Modest Proposal To Companies: Let Your Customers Respond To Your Emails - Kill no-reply@ (medium.com)

An anonymous reader shares a blogpost: Dear way-too-many companies, if you're allowed to send me an email, I'm allowed to send you an email. You just sent me an email and I have a question. Don't make me hunt for a way to ask it. Email already has a built-in way to do that -- reply. Whether it's good news or bad news, whether you're an established company or a startup, your customers will love you more if you let them reply to your emails.

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And one other thing...

[msauve]

Web forms are NOT email. Don't put a link on your website saying "email us" if it points to a web form.

Re:And one other thing...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

For the web form thing, I'd settle for at least knowing whether or not I'm going to be sent a copy of what I'm writing by email afterwards. If I am, I don't need to save it manually myself, but I also shouldn't include any sensitive information. If I'm not, maybe including sensitive details is OK but I also need to keep a copy.

You don't understand

[zifn4b]

Obviously, the author of this nonsense doesn't 1) Understand b2c communication and 2) Doesn't understand how to run a customer care center.

Take off your rose colored glasses for minute. First of all, no-reply emails are a means to notify a customer of something. They are one-way. They are not meant to be responded to like text message notifications of upcoming appointments or Amazon shipping notifications. Second, actually learn about call centers and customer care teams. You obviously have no clue. It's a lot harder than you think. Most call centers are fielding a variety of customer interactions like phone calls, emails and chat. They are also usually understaffed due to cost constraints. Before you write about something like you have no clue what you're talking about go learn what it takes to run one of these. If you do that, then you might not just complain about a lack of something, you might also have a suggestion as to how what you want ought to be done. Good luck

Re:You don't understand

[TheInternet01]

Clearly your company is small to medium. When your business gets large enough it can be uneconomical especially if non sense questions or basic "Read the manual" questions come in.

Like hi I just bought X how do I turn it on?

You get enough customers with enough content like that coming through and you have an issue. I like the approach you have but I do scrutinize the scalability of it. Small businesses often thrive because they have the flexibility to provide personalized support to their clients. A company like microsoft would be slammed with "I installed a program that says it's for windows 98 on windows 7, and it doesn't work, I need this really really really really really really bad, for business, how do I make it work?"

Re:No-reply@ is a valid address here

[green1]

Maybe, just maybe, you should consider using a different address then? It seems you really do accept replies, so why send from no-reply? You're discouraging your nice and polite users, while not discouraging the idiots. Seems somewhat the opposite of what you should want.

Re: Jews did 9/11

[presidenteloco]

No, the comment got modded down because it's mind-suckingly vacuous, offensive, and off-topic.

Terrible idea

[ilsaloving]

Lets enumerate all the problems with this, shall we?
-spam
-customers who reply with inappropriate things, like requests for support on a sales announcement, or other nonsense
-Out of Office replies
-SPAM
-Probably plenty of issues that didn't immediately pop into my head.
-unsubscribe requests

You then have to hire additional staff just to sift through the quagmire of emails to discard or route the emails to more appropriate destinations.

The convenience to the customer is minor. The burden on an organization to deal with such a system would be massive, possibly insurmountable.