I talked to a customer today who says we shouldn't send emails from "Help" because "Help" doesn't tell him anything and he just deletes them because "Help" is severely abused these days by spammers, phishers, etc.
He suggests emails should be from "Ting Billing" or "Ting Shipping" or something that makes more sense based on the content and nature of the email.
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Perhaps a better name for this feature would be "Make Ting Emails Sortable/Searchable by Category".
My working account has "deals" and "transactions" folders in addition to the basic inbox. Important stuff like bills and account status changes go to "transactions". I try to sort various vendors promo e-mails, which are ephemeral, into "deals". That avoids a lot of clutter. How could Ting make this work?
1. Vary the From: address:
[I went to the effort of making this fixed font so it would line up and it shows up correctly when I edit. Stupid Zendesk...]
The forums/knowledge base send e-mail as noreply@ting.zendesk.com, it seems. That's sortable.
Coming up with a reasonable scheme, documenting it with a knowledge base page and sticking to it would allow customers to sort Ting e-mails to their taste, or more easily search for things after the fact if they don't sort. This also has an advantage for Ting. When training a new employee on billing issues, that person can be assigned to cover the billing mail queue, etc. Note that ANY Ting address would get the correct help for a customer, it's just that replies to Ting e-mails would also sort nicely for Ting.
2. Let customers choose a Subject: prefix
A mail preferences page could allow customers to assign a short prefix to the e-mails from each of the above categories. They could then sort on this. It would also have an anti-fraud property. Any scammers who might try to spoof Ting e-mails would not know what prefixes various customers had assigned.
3. Provide a separate, optional, "critical" email address to which bills and other crucial account information would be sent.
This might also be useful when the person paying for the account is not the person using it.
I see the first suggestion as most reasonable, but mentioned the others for completeness. They aren't exclusive. Perhaps there could be a "copy critical e-mails to this address" option in the customer's profile.
My wife is utterly inundated by thousands of "deals" e-mails which we need to sit down and try to deal with. (Unsubscribe, set up filter rules, etc.) It's one reason we avoid e-billing - fear of missing that critical e-mail. Having mail that is easily split into critical/non-critical folders is very customer friendly.
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