I love the humble, often neglected email.

When I need to contact a company then I’m much happier being able to list all my points and information in an email to them.  It means that I have a copy of what I asked in my “Sent Items” and gives the company the opportunity to go through my points, compose a detailed response and then reply to me – which is great when I am asking questions that will require them to take some time to gather information.

Well, that’s the idea anyway!

The trouble is that the vast majority of companies I deal with just do not take email seriously.  The response times are very poor (often days), and on many occasions I don’t even get a reply! When I have to resort to the telephone to tell them my email hasn’t been responded to, the person I talk to usually doesn’t sound that surprised, like it’s acceptable that some emails may just get ignored or deleted at random. Sorry, but that is appalling.

When I do get the privilege of a reply, then often it’s not of much use anyway. Either some standard response copied/pasted or the responder clearly hasn’t even had the time to even read my email properly.

So why do we have to put up with this attitude towards emails in this day and age? It’s not like emails are some new overnight wonder that only just came in. Why do so many companies just not take emails seriously?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Here’s a few pearls of wisdom for any companies that place their email services pretty low down on the pecking order:

- Email is not a necessary evil. It is a very efficient way of communicating with your customers.
- With over 70% of UK households having Internet access, email is not going to go away. It’s here to stay and is getting more popular. Deal with it.
- You would not randomly hang-on on some of your customers who telephone you, play them a recorded message half way through a conversation or answer a totally different question from the one they asked – so don’t do it on email either.
- When someone sends you an email it does not mean their issue is trivial or “can’t be that important otherwise they would telephone”. It may just be your customer’s preferred method of correspondence.
- Leaving your customers hanging for days for a reply just because their query came in via email is not acceptable.
- If you are not going to take email seriously, save your customers some frustation and don’t offer the service in the first place.

Thankfully we do take your emails seriously at Daily. Checking our Support emails, the last response was within 30 minutes from when the email first arrived. It was from Nick in our Support team and addressed all the points asked as well as providing some additional information that Nick thought would be useful.  Pretty good going if I do say so myself.

Hopefully more and more companies will raise the bar to the same level as Daily when it comes to email, as personally I think some of the more “dinosaur-like” companies out there will only ever be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century (or even the 1990s for that matter!) when they realise their competition is leaving them behind and the service they offer is considered unacceptable by their customers. Until that time, many companies will be content to hide within the “norm” of what the majority of other companies out there offer – and the customer will lose out.