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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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Web forms are NOT email. Don't put a link on your website saying "email us" if it points to a web form.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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
We'll make great pets
My company doesn't want your opinion on our policies but still want your money. Signed, Anonymous CEO
Dear customer:
Thank you for your reply.
We value your input.
This is an automated reply to let you know that your email is 276,709th in line to be answered, and we will get to it as soon as possible.
Your estimated wait time is, well, you don't want to know. You really, really, do not want to know.
Sincerely,
Marvin, your robotic email automated response robot.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
... I can very much agree with this. HOWEVER, I *also* am painfully aware of how incredibly stupid and annoying people are. Allowing them to send replies to all sorts of automated e-mails would be a nightmare. After all, this isn't 1991, with only reasonably intelligent Internet users... which should also be painfully obvious.
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.
I saw the title and worried this was going to be about eating babies.
#DeleteChrome
How about the companies use the Reply-To header to direct replies to automated notifications to the correct place to handle them?
Yeah, we need a reply test bot - if it doesn't get through, neither does the email.
What is this "âSreply" technology? Is it like "AI"? I need to invest in this!
Assuming someone is being paid to read all of your pointless questions.
Trust me, there's going to be a fuck load of pointless questions...
I tend to rant.
There's a reason they don't do that anymore: they're tired of being spammed into oblivion by spambots just because they have an accessible email address.
The problem with a mailbox for actual replies from email marketing emails is those damn out of office replies.
Someone has to sift through hundreds, or thousands every send to find the actual messages.
Yes, mail rules can be setup to filter OOO emails from outlook, because all emails have a predictable subject line. Gmail for Business, on the other hand does not and let's the user set their own out of office subject line.
The objective is to discourage ALL inbound emails.
Email: customer writes an ACTUAL ESSAY about whatever fucking insane hallucination is bothering them today, but someone has to read it all because if a single paragraph is actually relevant, they need to jump on it.
Phone: the call handler can ask closed questions to get to the crux of the matter quickly.
Source: experience
No, the comment got modded down because it's mind-suckingly vacuous, offensive, and off-topic.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Requires companies to EXPAND their workforce to have people to reply to the emails ... and the whole point of automated emails is so they can cut staff.
The two efforts are polar opposites.
No reply is actually a good policy. Why? Because if the e-mail is spoofed, people could get phished. The problem is that companies don't take no-reply far enough. They put URLs in the e-mail, defeating the security inherent in the no-reply.
If it became widely understood that reply and URLs in e-mails from companies are illegitimate, we could stop a lot of phishing.
Buddy, Jews attacking New York would make as much sense as you attacking your own mosque.
Just fuck off already. You're an asshole, you're an idiot, and you're just plain wrong about every stupid thing you believe. Do you ever stay up late at night wondering whether anyone likes you? They don't. Because you're a stupid prick who makes the world worse, just by being here.
The other problem is that first level contact centres, although staffed with humans, are completely incapable of even reading your message, let alone providing a relevant reply. If you ask something that isn't in their script (and really, their script only includes things an absolute moron would ask) they'll just send you back a generic "reboot and try again" type of email which does you absolutely no good and just proves they didn't read the email where you specifically state that you already tried the exact steps they are now asking you to try.
Then don't reply to the "no-reply" emails!
As I said, you're currently discouraging your polite and intelligent users, while not discouraging the idiots. Why would anyone want to purposely select to only provide support to the idiots?
So there's a class of companies in that category...
There is another class of company that uses 'no-reply' because they are fixated on a particular engagement model that forces issues into tracket tickets and set of tools to manage them that doesn't know how to deal with email. They don't trust the user to keep an email thread intact to allow someone to follow the history, or they don't have software they trust to translate email thread to a ticketing system.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
So I assume you expect companies to hire another person to sort through all the emails and direct them to the correct department... if any?
Part of the reason companies have set emails is organization. They don't want tech questions coming to the finance department. No marketing vendors emailing the ops team and so on. When customers receive a general email like that it gets abused with random questions, often completely unrelated to the email that waste a lot of time that could be used for actual customer service.
And thus was born the automated phone menu, and the anguished cries of a billion souls who did know exactly what they needed to say and could have said it at least three times before they even got to speak to a real person.
Mind you, I bought something from Dell over the phone the other day, and I felt like I spent most of the call debugging the scripts their people were clearly reading from, so maybe it's not the automated aspect that is really the problem here...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Why would anyone want to purposely select to only provide support to the idiots?
Maybe they're in the lottery or alternative medicine business?
I guess they all have one thing in common: they're small enough (customer base-wide) to afford it.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Did someone let reality escape?
Companies don't really want to reply to customers unless that customer is performing a public review or statement. The Internet makes it far too easy to reply to a company for no real reason. (Oh my parcel arrived 10 minutes late or the packaging is dented). Sure, we'd like perfection. But we ain't going to get it.
We need a system rather like the eBay score system on a company that allows us to report a cockup by email. Then let them respond. It would have to be secure with people vouching for each other as genuine. It's the only way to make them listen. Make it a part of the Review process?
Companies only listen to high status reviewers on Twitter, YouTube or Facebook during their brief product launch. So let's hear about companies that don't want to talk to customers in the Review? We can make it better.
Stuart http://stuarthalliday.com/
I run a business and have worked for large corporations, so let me run my mouth about this, too. TFA is not wrong -- there is literally no reason for no-reply emails.
you'll know that people hit reply and say "thanks" or some other pointless and useless response a lot.
True, but that's why the reply goes to a mail filtering system. Those "thanks" emails and such never need to take up a human's time.
The "no-reply" address will never go away as long as email exists.
This is probably correct. But the point is that companies that do this are sending the message "go away, you suck". If that's what they are intending to say, then no problem. But if they want to enhance customer retention, they may wish to take a different approach.
Are you ready to buy a more expensive product for that functionality?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
You're pre-supposing that there exists a contact page on the website.
Worse case scenario is you could check the WHOIS contact info that is supposed to be kept up-to-date for maintaining the domain. When a Slashdot troll posted dick pics with my contact info on Russian websites, I used the WHOIS contact info for the few websites that didn't have an email address or contact form. Most of the time I got a response that the dick pic was removed. The non-responses included bounced emails because mailbox is full or no response at all.
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.
Companies that WANT your questions will allow it. The ones that use no-reply are the ones that don't want to hear from you to begin with.
Amazon lost my order. It was their delivery system that just lost it. They sent me an email asking me to contact them. The email was "no-reply". It was actually a bit of work to figure out how to correctly contact them, as none of the required options matched my situation. In the end, they refunded my order. But the please contacts us, but don't reply was silly. I'm not sure why a human had to be involved at all.
For once I do believe the 2 ACs are different persons!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
that's the unasked question about customer service. People will _always_ say yes. But when it's time to vote with their wallet more often than not it's really 'no'. There's a balance to be struck there. I think it was Sprint (mighta been Verizon) that once got a list of their top problem customers, the ones that called in almost daily, fought every little thing and in fact cost the company money, and asked them all to find a new carrier since it obviously wasn't working out between them. There are just times when you have to do that. Tough love, so to speak.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Most companies probably fit your category. I see many "noreply@company.com" as the return address from service announcements from companies that we have an established relationship with (otherwise we would never get their service announcements in the first place).
Then there are the other kind that is practically worse, I'm the recipient on several mail delivery lists for mutual funds (yes ever changing excel sheets sent via mail are the #1 distribution method of mutual fund companies...) and it seams that it's standard there to have these delivery lists be open so as soon as some other (of the thousands of connected companies) writes a reply in order to question the distributor it's bounced to all the members, at which point some one else replies with "please don't send this to me" which bounces yet another round, and so it goes.
but nobody would read them.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Buddy, Jews attacking New York would make as much sense as you attacking your own mosque.
Or NAMBLA attacking Marlin Brando films.
This space unintentionally left blank.
The people running big companies, especially big near-monopolies, think that they get to unilaterally define the terms of all communication. They want the customer to think long and hard before they dare to ask for something to be made right. This is done by making it as painful as possible to talk to a representative and if you are lucky enough to actually get to speak to a person it will likely be someone with no authority to resolve a problem and who will just hide behind the excuse that the "their system" won't allow them to do what needs to be done.
The no-reply thing even happens with snail mail. I once received an erroneous medical bill which I sent back with a letter explaining why the bill was in error. The payment processing center decided that they could not be bothered with two-way communication and simply reported me to collections.
You're missing the point. this company is choosing to actively reward the idiots vs the polite customers. They ARE choosing to limit their customer base to exclude polite people.
I'm suggesting that they'd be better off choosing to do business with both, rather than only with the idiots.
I'm not suggesting that you can afford to work only with good customers, but when you have some, why discourage them in favour of the idiots?
I wonder if the submmiter and editors are aware that a title like this usually implies a reference to Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal ? Because, despite we customers being food for companies, I'm failing to see a connection of TFS or TFA to the essay (synopsis below):
Swift suggests that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
To be honest I have actually never ever received a "thanks" email as a reply to any notification that I have sent out so I'm questioning the validity of ACs claim that this actually happens, and if so that it happens in enough scale to justify a no-reply return address.
You have the choice not to do business with those companies.
Technically correct, but it ends up being a Hobson's choice. Some businesses are monopolies, such as the power company, the water company, the natural gas company, and in many cases the wired Internet company. Good luck doing without those, especially if you are a landlord who is required by law to offer these utilities to tenants.
This is a non-story
The remainder of your comment relies on relative privation.
Think about it - if you were running a very large company, would you rather: a) have a catch-all email that runs the gamut of issues, feedback, etc. b) have a way to submit categorized feedback via web forms? I'd much rather have the latter. It can be easily routed to the proper department by issue type, enforce that certain fields are filled in, etc. My suggestion is make sure an email contains clear links on how to provide feedback, not necessarily allow direct replies.
Post your email here so we may properly reply to you.
I'd be happy if they just responded to their damn mail in the first place. There's a large percentage of places that I've used the form to contact the company or the email address that I've found on their site to get in touch with someone from a company asking about a product that I want to buy or use and I never hear back from them. It's at least 50%. Why do these companies bother with the forms or email addresses if they don't answer messages?
For example, I wanted to know where my property line was so I contacted four surveying companies via their websites. Only one got back to me. This was for a fence that I'm going to build. No manufacturers responded to my questions because I wanted to do it myself and I asked them for copies of instructions as their sites didn't have it. I'm doing it myself because the fencing companies are terrible in my area. About half don't respond to email. The only company that I liked when they came by for a quote never emailed the quote even when I followed up for it. The other companies spent their time putting down the competition and telling me how they didn't like my yard.
I've sent messages off to ask about replacement parts or to ask about information that isn't on websites all without hearing back from companies. These are all things that can easily be handled by email and are cheaper for the company to do that way rather than have me call up. Yet by not responding they force me to call, in the case of getting a replacement part, or take my business elsewhere.
You're assuming that companies want to talk to their customers. They don't. The best customer is the one who pays the bill and makes no noise.
By making it increasingly difficult to contact companies for any kind of support or assistance, they've muted their customers. Why would they want to undo this?
Are you under the illusion that companies actually care?
No-reply has its purpose. The problem is it's been abused.
The original intention is for user-initiated notifications like password resets, or other automated notifications from sources other than newsletters.
Unfortunately some (most) places forgot what the purpose of no-reply was.
Also, the email landscape has changed slightly over the years. Transactional email services (like Sendgrid, Mailgun, etc) have changed the way we send emails.
Since sending transactional emails is usually decoupled from the primary email service, it makes it difficult to reply to an outgoing only address. In most cases you can set a Reply-to address, but for some reason businesses are not setting it.
The problem is that if you respond to their email there is an assumption that you want somebody to read your response...and respond to your response. That can get expensive in a hurry for the company who may get thousands of support emails a day.
A lot of effort (and $) goes into trying to deflect support calls with automated attendants, FAQs, user support communities, chatbots and even old-fashioned support articles or <gasp> better design. But of course some support calls (and emails) still happen.
If you allow customers to respond to support emails a lot of them will. And now you have a support agent spending more time reading and responding to each of those messages. Support costs up. Profits down. More satisfied customers? Maybe yes, maybe no.
Unfortunately these days making the shareholders happy seems to be more important than making the staff or the customers happy. Shareholders want more profits and that means lower costs and that means not paying add'l support agents to sit there answering long email threads.
-B-
Sending emails === Potential for additional sales
Receiving emails === Guarantee of additional costs
Requiem for the American Dream
Like hi I just bought X how do I turn it on?
Write something to the effect "Instructions to turn on your device are on page 2 of the Setup Guide." and give a link to the HTML version of the guide.
Small businesses often thrive because they have the flexibility to provide personalized support to their clients.
Then why not structure a large business as a collection of small businesses?
Is your customer base small enough? Hint: if you have e.g. millions of customers, no-reply is a must.
It's not the absolute size as much as the ratio of tier 1 support personnel per customer.
This is an automated reply to let you know that your email is 276,709th in line to be answered, and we will get to it as soon as possible.
By itself, this appears a step in the right direction. If I know your company's small army of support staff answered, say, half a million messages last week, I know to expect information on which I can act in three business days.
But then Marvin blows it with this refusal to provide any sort of scale for how quickly the queue moves:
Your estimated wait time is, well, you don't want to know. You really, really, do not want to know.
What's the name of your company? Maybe if we publicize the problem from your perspective it will be self-correcting...
Requiem for the American Dream
I've never received literal "thank you" emails in response to notifications (unless the notice was to a specific person about an issue they specifically wanted to know about), but I have received general acknowledgement responses.
I suspect the bigger issue, though, is that the companies probably have a a large number of dead email addresses in their distribution list, and probably see a whole lot of bounces with every mailing. However, those are trivially easy to filter out, so shouldn't affect a thing (and if the company were really smart, they'd use those bounces to trim their database a bit).
Why is this vacation auto-reply not rate-limited to one mail per (sender, recipient) address pair per week?
This and:
Dear modest consumer:
You don't have a fucking clue regarding our business model, strategy, or tactic.
If you did, you'd be sending DoNotReply shit to us.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
How did they get the pictures of your dick?
Did they hack into your phone or something?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Software can triage email coming in, and failing that, round robin the email to humans who may not know how to answer, but know their own company well enough to quickly bounce to someone who will.
Already email analysis is a fact of life (spam and phishing), having customer relationship management as part of that doesn't seem such a stretch.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Got news for ya.
I've filed and won already using this method.
Come back when you've got good legal experience. I took on Electronic Arts and won. When you can handle huge corporate lawyers, feel free to return to this conversation.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It could be argued that even those user initiated notifications warrant a way of replying. For example I got an email notification of a password reset on an account that I did *not* ask for. In this case it was encouraged to reply if this was not the case, while also unable to continue without my assenting.
Anytime you receive a message toward one human, it just makes sense for that human to be able to reach back and engage with another human because the automated context may not always be what it seems.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This wouldn't have been a problem if it hadn't been for companies polluting the email system with endless advertising to begin with. If it had just remained a channel for communication, accepting emails would not have been a problem at all.
No replay email addresses are for automated notifications.
I am sorry, but no. No replay email addresses are the ones you only want to play with once.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
If you are sending with No-Reply@ as your FROM address and the delivery fails, how are you going to fix your mailing list when you don't get the delivery failure notice? Do that too many times and your delivery failure rate will go up and most ISPs will decide you are a spammer and cut you off completely. Businesses sending email need valid FROM addresses so they can actively manage their relationship with their customers, which includes making sure email addresses are current and valid, and it is easy for their customers to contact them.
Maybe he just hates himself? I would, if I was him.
And yet, for every one caller who knows exactly what to say, there are probably 1000 who don't. Different types of calls (for an ISP: calling about a problem with the service, asking about prices and ordering a new service etc) usually are answered by different people (sales vs troubleshooting for example), so it would be best if the company had multiple phone numbers where you can call. However, people will routinely call the wrong number and then bitch that the sales guy cannot tell them to reboot their router. Also, having one number is better, because it is easier to remember. Thus, the automated menu was born, hopefully routing most of the callers to the correct employees. Of course, there will be some who have some weird problem and the none of the menu options are correct, but they can choose a random option and the employee who answers will transfer them. The idea is to make these transfers infrequent.
Although, I know of one company where no matter which menu option you choose (there are three), you will be routed to the same employee (the company is small, they only have one employee answering phones).
Nope. Fuck that class of company too, because it's ultimately the same damn thing. Fundamentally, companies are either willing to engage on the customer's terms... or they aren't. And the latter don't deserve anyone's business.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If I were running a very large company, I would want everyone to be forced to just give me their money instead of having to go through the trouble of actually selling something to them in return.
But I wouldn't be entitled to that -- just like how companies are not entitled to be able to dictate communications terms to their customers, either!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Fucking DRM is a whole 'nother problem!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Having had a front row seat to one of those, they are afraid they'll look like ignorant idiots if they try to engage to open ended emails to their company. They are afraid of setting the expectation they could help via email, and then get judged poorly when they fail at trying. They might have an incredibly disparate set of products bearing their name.
I don't know them personally, but imagine if you emailed 'help@honeywell.com'. Honeywell has everything from little home space heaters to military UAVs to Airport landing systems. Such a company may be concerned that without some requiring some context, that they'll bumble the reply and it will look poorly.
Of course, a 'nice' thing would be software that analyzes and engages in a 'phone tree' like auto-reply if it can't figure it out. A nicer thing would be a few humans to sort it out.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
FWIW, I don't so much mind the organisations with a single, short phone menu for the reason you mentioned. It's the ones where you spend several minutes going through several levels of menus, and then at the end they just cut you off (or to add insult to injury, refer you to their web site and then cut you off, when you were calling precisely because their web site was broken, incomplete or incorrect).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
In my opinion, if someone tried to reset your password on a service, there is absolutely nothing the site owner can do. I'm not sure how contacting them would resolve the issue.
I develop websites and management systems for a living. Having a user contact you over someone else trying to reset your password really is a situation that doesn't need an email reply from the user.
If you do reply, all you're going to get is a shrug and "There's nothing we can do about it. Maybr try changing your username, email address, or password."
I really fail to see how this type of notification woulf warrant a reply.
Yeah, this is a situation where while it might get sent out by the no-reply address, it should be simple enough to code the bot to have a reply-to address when it's sending out a "Contact us please" notice--I'd think that whom to contact would be one of the blanks in the form letter, really, so not only will the email go to the correct place when you click reply, but it'll be in the body of the email too, possibly with a phone number and hours if calling will be an option.
It generally isn't difficult to find the general contact information for a business--there's almost always a Contact Us page on their website, and you can find a link either in the header or footer of their home page, if not on every page. It's only particularly difficult to get this info if the company's a fly-by-night affair. (Now, finding the contact info for the people you actually need can be a bit of a trick, but usually you can go with something genetic in the basic area you need and if you guessed wrong they'll probably be able to direct you to where you need to be. I've done this song-and-dance when I had to deal with a company where my problem was I'd very much like to pay them but their site wouldn't let me.)
It sounds like you've never met the particular flavor of phone tree hell that is the USPS's service number. It hangs up on you, no explanation, no nothing, on certain of the routes, not even a "Go visit your local post office." You just select an option and, with no particular rhyme or reason other than certain options being pretty consistent in doing this, it'll just hang up on you. While I've repeatedly managed to stumble across how to reach a human? About the only advice I can give on how to pull that off is that screaming HUMAN at the phone tree is going to be necessary, but it also is not reliably. No particular observed pattern here.
Oh, and it appears that sometimes the entire call center will just shut down for the night, not bothering to do things like make sure nobody's still on hold or turn off hold with a "Awww, you've been waiting for a human for hours? Well, you're not getting one tonight!" notice, leaving you just sitting and being reassured by the on-hold recording that they'll get to your call. Eventually.
The worst part is that, really, as far as I can tell, the sole reason you would need to call the number instead of doing it online is because you need a human...
Uh, yea, the story was even here on Slashdot back in.. 2009 was it?
So you can go fuck yourself. :D
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.