Responding to Customers Email

Responding to Customers' Email

The simplest and most basic use of email is to answer inquiries from customers. Email has the advantage over telephones in that it does not occur in real time; if you take one minute to answer a phone call it is a long time, but if you take an hour or even a day to answer email, customers will generally accept the delay. Customers who live or work more than a few time zones away will often find email more practical to use than phone calls because they can send you email at any time instead of trying to find an hour when both you and they are at work. This time-shifting ability, combined with a written record at both ends, was a big reason teletypes were often used, instead of telephones, for intercontinental business communications back in pre-Internet days.

Think of email as a nearly free teletype service that doesn't require a big machine that makes loud chunk-chunka noises all day long and you'll have a handle on its most basic use.

Email can also replace faxes. The transmission cost is lower, and because it doesn't take a separate phone line to send or receive email, no one should ever get a busy signal when trying to send an email to you, which is a distinct possibility when you rely on a fax machine as your primary (written) electronic communications device.

You should figure on 24 hours or one business day as the longest acceptable time to respond to sales or general customer service email. Acceptable tech support email time limits depend on the nature of your business. Obviously, if you are selling a product or service which people depend on to run their business, an hour can seem like eternity to your customer.

Reporters on deadline also need rapid email responses. Fail to answer email from the media almost immediately and you risk seeing the dreaded "[your name here] could not be reached to respond to the allegations" line in print or on a respected industry news Web site. Reporters may not be customers, but in effect they represent customers and prospective customers, often thousands or hundreds of thousands of them.

Email is a cruel master in a way postal mail has never been, but it is less demanding than the telephone, and less expensive than fax service. It also offers temptations which other means of communications do not.