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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.
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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
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.
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
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.
Buddy, Jews attacking New York would make as much sense as you attacking your own mosque.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. . . .
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)