A journalist asked me why businesses are poor on email responses. The thought that went through my head was “why should they be?”
- Generation Y consumers don’t use much email so why develop it further
- It’s too late now! We’ve been trained, as consumers, that email doesnt work well when you send it most companies. Even if they respond at all, you don’t get any answers
- email is very good for getting things wrong, it’s a poor 2 way conversation. So it’s better to phone back. Seldom happens but a great wow if a company does.
- c2c communities are much more useful – insightful and supportive – if companies know how to foster them without interfering they are a great source of insight and support (Innocent is a good example) . Get in touch (peter.massey@budd.uk.com) if you want to talk more about how you can develop communities in c2c or b2b.
More fundamentally email off cues from websites are usually a substitute for really giving customers the answers they want, how they want them and where they want them. That’s because most companies:
- Don’t have metrics that show them what contact they have in other channels because their websites dont help
- When customers get in touch they don’t ask for feedback on why they had to get in touch
- They can’t act on the feedback they have, let alone more complex feedback like that if they got it
- They don’t have fast pubishing processes that can get changes made in minutes rather than weeks
Read about how Amazon does some of these processes in the Skyline and “what our customers are saying” sections of our site or take a look at some of the papers in the library
