Does e-mailing a company often get no response?

[fluiddruid]

@Shecky

I worked “Customer Care” for a certain VOIP company that should be bankrupt. Here’s the deal:
All emails are filtered - certain words put it into certain queues. They do NOT go to a person or a group. It’s up to the CS reps to go into the queue and start pulling the messages out, and either give the canned response or do some investigative legwork and get back to the customer. Often, they will see it’s a technical issue and shunt it to the tech support queue. Or, it’s to find out about why the line keeps dropping after 15 seconds (tier 3 support).

Now, since this is an “additional” task, the priority is on answering calls and getting to the emails whenever there’s a lull (never). When I was there, it was almost 9 months behind, which triggered a special team of CS Green Berets to work the queue and get it down to within a month. I heard when I left that it was back up to about 3 months.

That is just asinine. What’s the point of responding to a 9 month old email about VOIP service?

So many companies have wrong-headed thinking about email. Because they’ve gotten accustomed to call centers, they figure that email is an additional task. It’s not. It’s an alternate way of handling the same transaction. Some types of transactions (e.g. orders) need to be done securely, and thus are done by phone or customer self-service, but a lot of other issues - customer service, presales, technical support - are much easier to handle by email. Would you rather have an agent wait for several minutes while a customer gathers needed information, or just send the information that’s needed in an email and then respond once we have it? Would you rather a customer hem and haw in your agent’s ear, or have the agent be able to quickly read an email and pick out the important information? An agent can take far more emails in a day than calls.

Answering emails promptly is of course the key to this. Anything beyond 24-48 hours is pointless; customers are going to call to get it resolved, or give up.

If you really don’t want emails, just direct people to call. Don’t make them wait in endless queues and waste employee time handling long outdated inquiries.

[control-z]

That’s my main objection, don’t accept e-mails if you aren’t going to answer them. I’d rather be told honestly up front than have to remember they never answered me.