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E-mail Responses to Customers
E-mail lets you answer a lot more questions than you could
handle on the phone or by regular mail. You have a few moments
to think, and you can write a reasonably personal response without
having to dial, wait, go through an extension, interrupt the con-
sumer at work, exchange pleasantries about the weather, and listen
to a long historical narrative leading slowly up to the problem
itself. So invite e-mail questions from your guests.
Provide detailed contacts with names
and pictures, not faceless forms
Invite people to call, e-mail, or write you a letter. Putting up real
names and pictures with e-mail addresses, snail mail addresses,
and (most daring of all) phone numbers will make people feel as if
they actually have a chance of reaching a human being, not some
robotic autoresponder.
Plus, if your organization can stand it, you can carve up respon-
sibility for answering customer e-mails, and suggest that if the
question deals with printers, this person is the one to write to, but
if people are having a problem with a scanner, they should try this
other person. You can filter a lot of questions right on the Web
site, rather than depending on expensive software to analyze
incoming traªc. If you dont dare admit who you are on the site,
then spend the money to route the e-mail to the right respondent,
within seconds, so e-mails dont end up in the hands of idiots or
people who could care less about the issue.
Set up guidelines for responses
Set up an auto-responder to reply within a minute, saying,
Thanks for your message. Ill get back to you within 24 hours.
People suspect their e-mail will go wrong. So getting an immediate
response is reassuring, even if the text is boilerplate. (Of course,
you ought to put your full name, address, and phone in there, too,
as evidence of your good faith).
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E-mail Responses to Customers
Write as though Mom were reading.
Nancy Flynn,
The ePolicy Handbook
HotTextInterior.ch12.339.xprs 12/18/01 6:24 PM Page 332 Then beat their expectations by responding within 6 hours.
Dont let a day go by without a response.
You must set some kind of deadline for replies. The sign of a
mature site is absolute determination to reply within a few hours.
Beginning sites often neglect this little touch, making thousands
of customers mad enough to vow never to return.
Set some limits on what respondents can say, too. You cant
preannounce products or services, promise repairs that may not
materialize, swear that if the reader just follows your advice every-
thing will work like a well-oiled machine.
Develop a styleguide just for e-mail. Define the exact capitaliza-
tion, spelling, punctuation of product names, departments, techni-
cal terms, so you are consistent within your message, and if anyone
else writes to the same customer, the text looks as if it comes from
the same company. Youll probably want to ban e-mail abbreviations
like BTW (by the way), and THX (Thanks) because some people
imagine those are airports, or car models.
Make the subject line mean something
You dont want the customer deleting your message, thinking it is
just another pitch for working at home, winning a sweepstake, los-
ing weight, spying on people, or getting a diploma without taking
a course. Use at least one word from the customers description of
the problem.
Whats the point? You have a purpose: articulate that in your
subject line.
If the customer wrote a particular subject line, repeat it. Dont
go generic.
Start off recognizing what they said
Your consumer is still a bit suspicious. To capture attention right
away, begin your message by writing a sentence that includes the
language the customer used. Dont just quote themthats too
mechanical. Think about what they said and apologize for the
diªculty, taking care to show you have actually listened to their
representation of the problem.
If the customers have sent nasty, snotty, vicious, or stupid mes-
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The subject line is your friend.
Jim Sterne,
Customer Service on the Internet
HotTextInterior.ch12.339.xprs 12/18/01 6:24 PM Page 333 sages, make the e¤ort to put yourself in their position. Try to
understand how your site could have provoked such a reaction. Of
course, some folks are just jerks, and no amount of empathy will
make you respect them. And if you have some smart-aleck com-
ment, tell your neighbor, but resist typing it into your response.
Snappy put-downs have a way of turning an irritated customer into
a militant adversary.
Deliberately express sympathy and interest
Your jobs to help, not poke a customer with a stick. So, within the
constraints of diplomacy and your job, dare to say that you are
sorry, that you are concerned, that you care.
Even if you are talking about a technical subject, indulge in a lit-
tle enthusiasm if you can manage it, but dont just throw in a few
exclamation points. Real interest shows in nouns and verbsnot
smarmy adjectives, and oily adverbs. And never, never go ALL
CAPS. Thats shouting in your readers ear. Alas, most businesses
discourage the use of emoticons, that wonderful iconic language
indicating the tone of voice.
Encourage your feminine side
Gender di¤erences show up in conversations via e-mail, according to
some recent research. If the subject is technical, the tradition is male.
Men come online to give information or give an
answer, and in essence, stop the conversation.
(David Silver, Resource Center for Cyber Culture
Studies)
Men tend to make strong assertions. (Susan Herring,
Indiana University at Bloomington, Information
Sciences and Linguistics)
Male-pattern e-mail seems to be abrupt, informational, and
aggressive. Men tend to start or contribute eagerly to flame wars,
but otherwise aim to limit the amount of interaction.
Useful, practical, to the pointthats the masculine style. But
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Women tend to use the electronic
medium as an extension of the
way they talklavishly and inti-
mately, to connect with people and
build rapport.
Joyce Cohen,
He-Mails, She-Mails,
New York Times
HotTextInterior.ch12.339.xprs 12/18/01 6:24 PM Page 334 its a bit o¤-putting in an e-mail to a puzzled, upset, angry, or anx-
ious consumer.
The feminine approach to e-mail is to soften most assertions,
raise questions, make o¤ers, give suggestions, and throw in a lot
of polite comments, to support the other person. In all these ways,
women encourage others to engage, according to professors
Herring and Silver.
For guys, this style can mean slowing down, indulging in a little
thought about the other person, making an e¤ort to be agreeable,
and weakening any assertions about what the customer may have
done or thought.
Of course, youre writing in public, to someone you dont know.
You can be polite without being fake, and you can keep your lan-
guage gender neutral by talking about you not he or she.
Drop in boilerplate
answers to common questions
You dont have time to answer the same question a hundred
di¤erent ways. Settle on a pretty good response, and drop that into
the e-mail after you have made a personal connection and expressed
your feelings. The boilerplate version should be a very simple, very
plain analysis of the problem, with clear steps to remedy it.
Just make sure your boilerplate doesnt give you away. If the
standard chunk sounds completely unlike your opening, or refers
to an illustration above, your cover will be blown. Best betre-
read the material in context and make a few edits, to keep the tone
and content relevant.
Add a signature block
Let them get hold of you. Put as much of an address as you can
stand. Put a favorite quote, if your firm allows it.
Sign your name. What a simple way to personalize a message!
Iron out the wrinkles
Run the spell checker and grammar checker, will you? Dont
assume that because so many e-mails look like the senders typed
them with their toes, you can get away with typos, left-out words,
repeated words, messed-up punctuation.
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Expression is the act of the whole
man, that our speech may be vas-
cular. The intellect is powerless to
express thought without the aid of
the heart and liver and of every
member.
Henry Thoreau, Journal
HotTextInterior.ch12.339.xprs 12/18/01 6:24 PM Page 335 Open up the page, too. Break up the text into a lot of short para-
graphs, put extra white space around headings, and use asterisks
for bullets (the dingbats, circles, and squares may not survive e-
mail hell). Set your e-mail program to break lines after 65 charac-
ters, so, with luck, the reader can see your whole text without
having to scroll horizontally, or choose Word Wrap, just to figure
out what you are saying.
You dont want irritating little wrinkles to distract the reader
from your messa