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

[Holi]

Obviously you should follow your own advice. Customer retention is probably one of the highest priorities of a call center especially for smaller businesses. If ditching the no-reply helps me keep my customers, then BYE.

And we did. instead we use logic and filters to direct emails to the people who can provide the best answers. 20% growth over the past 4 years must mean something is working.

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: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".

Thank you for your reply...

[davidwr]

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.

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.

Oh, thank goodness!

[93 Escort Wagon]

I saw the title and worried this was going to be about eating babies.

Re: Jews did 9/11

[presidenteloco]

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

Re:Jews did 9/11

[Applehu Akbar]

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

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.

Re:You're nobody.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.