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.

Comments

Re:You don't understand

[war4peace]

20% growth over the past 4 years must mean something is working.

Yes but not necessarily the way you handle communication. Also, pedantic mode on: 20% growth could mean you have 5 customers instead of 4.
Also, when taking into account whether no-reply is good or bad, you have a plethora of factors to consider. Some below, off the top of my head, not necessarily sorted by importance:

1. Are your products expensive enough to ditch/not use no-reply?
2. Is your customer base small enough? Hint: if you have e.g. millions of customers, no-reply is a must.
3. Is your support center large enough to ditch no-reply?
4. Have you calculated/extrapolated/estimated/thought of how much would it cost to not use no-reply?
5. Have you thought about what would happen if would not use no-reply AND still be unable to answer your customers?
6. Do your outbound e-mails contain anything that your customers can reply to? Sending something like "we have a new product called X and you can find it clicking here" generates no relevant replies.

Now, think about this: no-reply is an effect. The cause for its existence is a multitude of factors and only one of them is "we don't care about our customers".

Re:You're nobody.

[Khyber]

No-Reply is awesome, because it lets me send auto-replay e-mail based EULAs regarding how my E-mail is used. Violate it - your ass pays. You still received the contract.

It's a nice lucrative thing since they're to scared to get their precious usage of EULA nullified. You just sue in Small Claims, they never show up, send the court-ordered payment to their company, get the check a few days later.