HTML Preview E Mail Responses To Customers page number 1.
E-mail lets you answer a lot more questions than you could
handle on the phone or by regular mail. You have a few moments
to think, and you can write a reasonably personal response without
having to dial, wait, go through an extension, interrupt the con-
sumer at work, exchange pleasantries about the weather, and listen
to a long historical narrative leading slowly up to the problem
itself. So invite e-mail questions from your guests.
Provide detailed contacts with names
and pictures, not faceless forms
Invite people to call, e-mail, or write you a letter. Putting up real
names and pictures with e-mail addresses, snail mail addresses,
and (most daring of all) phone numbers will make people feel as if
they actually have a chance of reaching a human being, not some
robotic autoresponder.
Plus, if your organization can stand it, you can carve up respon-
sibility for answering customer e-mails, and suggest that if the
question deals with printers, this person is the one to write to, but
if people are having a problem with a scanner, they should try this
other person. You can filter a lot of questions right on the Web
site, rather than depending on expensive software to analyze
incoming traªc. If you don’t dare admit who you are on the site,
then spend the money to route the e-mail to the right respondent,
within seconds, so e-mails don’t end up in the hands of idiots or
people who could care less about the issue.
Set up guidelines for responses
Set up an auto-responder to reply within a minute, saying,
“Thanks for your message. I’ll get back to you within 24 hours.”
People suspect their e-mail will go wrong. So getting an immediate
response is reassuring, even if the text is boilerplate. (Of course,
you ought to put your full name, address, and phone in there, too,
as evidence of your good faith).
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Hot Text
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Web Writing That Works
E-mail Responses to Customers
Write as though Mom were reading.
—Nancy Flynn,
The ePolicy Handbook
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