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Stuff: Electronic mail is becoming a common way to do business. More and more businesses are offering customer support via email. Businesses negotiate with each other using email. It is replacing the fax machine as the way to exchange information instantaneously. But many companies do not make proper use of email. It's no good advertising a company email address, if there's nobody to read and reply to the mail. Customers who send you email will expect a prompt reply - if they don't get it, they will take their business elsewhere. Email is also becoming a common way of communicating within companies. It is starting to replace memos, it is a good way of sending out reports or newsletters, and in some cases it replaces verbal instructions or face-to-face conversations. Again, this must be dealt with properly or it gets out of hand. Here, then, are my rules for dealing with business email.
Email is instantaneous, which is its big advantage over snail mail. A customer can write to you and know you have got the letter right away (Internet delays excepted). So it makes no sense to sit on the email for days or even weeks. One of my jobs is to answer the customer support mail for my company. The rule I follow is that every mail should receive a reply within 24 hours. The only exception to this is abusive emails, which don't require any reply and should be ignored. Even if a query cannot be dealt with immediately, it is courteous to reply to the email so the customer knows she is not being ignored. Tell her that you can't help right away but you'll do whatever is necessary and get back to her in a few days. If something happens which prevents you from resolving the question or problem by the time you said you could, write again and update her on what's going on.
Someone in your company should have as part of their job the responsibility for dealing with email. It shouldn't be left for whoever happens to have time to do it - that's a system to ensure it never gets dealt with! You wouldn't allow the paper post to go unopened for days because it wasn't anyone's specific job to open it, so make sure email is a proper part of someone's job.
If you're the one who has been given the responsibility for email, then schedule a time each day to check your email, and stick to it. Email is important because it's an interface between your company and your customers, so don't just assume you can fit it in between more important tasks. It is an important task in its own right.
If you don't schedule a time to do your email, and you don't deal with it promptly, you will end up with a backlog, and that will make it even more difficult to deal with email efficiently. New incoming mail will get swallowed up into the old, undealt with mail. The task of dealing with the backlog will seem more and more difficult each day so you will put off dealing with it. Meanwhile new mail will make the backlog increase, making it a more daunting task. So don't allow the mail to build up to such an extent that you can't see how to clear it.
Sometimes mail backlogs are unavoidable, for example if you go on holiday or are off sick. When you get back to your mail, you need to set aside enough time to clear that backlog right away. Don't put it off or you'll never get round to it.
In a business context, an email is just as important as a letter or memo sent on paper. That's something many people have a hard time accepting, with the result that they give less priority to a request or instruction that arrives via email than they would if it was on paper. It is wrong to give less validity to email than to paper mail; take your email seriously.
Sometimes an email you receive will really tick you off, and you will want to fire back an instant reply roasting the customer for being so rude/stupid/thoughtless or whatever. Don't! You cannot call an email back once you have sent it, so don't respond to an email if you are feeling angry, outraged or hurt by its contents. Sit on your hands for ten minutes, or as long as it takes for you to calm down, and then respond to the problem or question in the email and not to the tone. No business ever wins by trying to score points off the customers.
Before you send an email, read it through to make sure it really does say what you want it to say. Proof-read it for spelling and grammatical errors. If your email program has a spell-checker built in, use it. You would not send a business letter through the paper post without giving it the once-over for errors, and the same applies to email. It is just as important when sending a business email to present a professional image as it is with paper mail, so check, check and check again.
With paper correspondence, everything gets filed one way or another so it can be referred to for the future. You will almost certainly need to refer to old email in the same way, so figure out some way to archive it, either by printing it out and adding it to your paper filing system, or by archiving it electronically. It's no good just dumping mail files to disk; think up a way to make it easy to retrieve the emails again later. How you do this will depend on your mail program, the volume of email and the type of letters. But do find a way to make it work, otherwise you'll have no customer history to aid in dealing with ongoing problems, or repeat customers.
It's so easy with email to add multiple CCs to everything you send. The temptation to make sure that everyone who may, just possibly, find your email relevant gets a copy is overwhelming, particularly if you're at all concerned about covering your back, or being seen to have done something. But resist the temptation! If you send unnecessary emails to someone, it just clogs up their mailbox and makes it more difficult for them to cope with their own email. If you get a reputation for sending unnecessary emails, they'll start ignoring everything you send - even the letters that really are important. They may also just stop reading all email because there is too much to cope with, and that would be a real backward step. There is too much junk mail in the world. Don't add to it by using multiple CCs. Make sure your emails only go to the people who will really find them relevant. |
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