Replying to Emails

One of my many pet hates in life is having my emails ignored. To me its just as rude and unforgivable as someone who ignores you as you stand in front of them and attempt to communicate verbally. Considering this is the year 2008 and email technology has been with us for decades, there’s no excuse in my book for ignoring a person’s carefully though out and time consuming email.

My theory is that because the person I email is not psychically in the room and might be on another continent even, they feel that there will be no repercussions if they put it aside for a while or even delete it. Fair enough you say if your email is of no interest to them or you’re a spammer! But what if I’m emailing a company enquiring about a service?

Last year I had cause to seek out a Web Design company to outsource some work to that I hadn’t the talents or time for myself so I googled some local ones and finalized a list of about 4/5 to contact. After having emailed them all and hinting that my client was a large company with a presence in a few international territories, I sat back and waited for the responses to flood in. Surely a web design company would be able to check emails regularly and get back to people pronto. Not! Out of 5 I emailed, 2 never replied at all, 2 took a few days to reply and 1 got back after a few hours. The one that got back to me quickest however, didn’t have the time obviously to fully read my email (it wasn’t a life story) and respond to the actual questions I asked.

The trouble is, because of my geographical location, principles when it comes to phone companies (Eircom ****s) and the fact that I’m in front of the PC all day, my main form of communication has become email. For me email is the ideal form of communication as you can carefully prepare what you want to say, get it to someone immediately and include all manner of media and attachments to illustrate your point.

Those companies who refuse to move out of the dark ages and don’t have the intelligence and foresight to realize how fantastic a customer or potential client feels when they get an immediate email reply and the benefits this has in terms of ‘good customer service’ (whaas da?, I hear them say) will eventually loose out in some way and so they should.

Please don’t be one of these companies. If you have an email address and if you promote it in any way then use it.

Leon

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Posted in General, Moans & Gripes on April 15th, 2008
Tags: email etiquette, email reply, replying to emails
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