You’re in a department store, looking to buy a shirt. “Excuse me,” you say to a staff member, “where can I find the menswear department?” “Are you looking for casual wear or formal?” they ask. Immediately, they shut their eyes and cover their ears, leaving you open mouthed and offended.
This interaction is weird, right? And a really stupid way to treat customers? But it’s exactly what we do on the web when we send e-mail from a no-reply address.
Here’s a recent communication from Amazon AWS—as instructed on their site, I mailed them about a specific billing issue.
Hello,
I checked our records, but I can’t find an AWS account associated with the e-mail address you wrote from. I’m not able to answer questions about your account unless you write to us from the e-mail address associated with your account. Please write back from that other e-mail address. You can go to the URL below to contact us again…
[A load of links to and bumf about forums, feedback forms, etc.]
Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.
Best regards,
Scott R.
Given the crappy copy and links in the message, after a quick scan, it’s not difficult to miss a key line or two and be left thinking you can hit reply and continue the conversation. After all, they originally asked me to e-mail them, they just replied to my mail, they ask me to “write back”, speak in the first person and they sign with a staff member’s name. I typed “Hi Scott, there must be some confusion. There is no another e-mail add—” before I noticed the “cannot accept incoming e-mail” line.
Yes, I’m an idiot—I should have read the mail properly. Yes, this is an especially bad example—Amazon have really messed this one up. And yes, I fully understand that there are operational reasons why you don’t want tonnes of unorganised, unfiltered mail going to one address.
But, I’m not the only idiot in the world. And Amazon are not the only company that talk at their customers like this—some Contrast apps make this mistake. And most importantly, operational challenges are not your customer’s concern! If you ask for payment in return for a product or service that sometimes doesn’t meet expectations, you better not ask a pissed-off customer to jump through hoops to let them give you a second chance!
But this isn’t just about customer service situations. E-mail is a two-way medium. If you break that key facet of the medium any time you send any message, you break e-mail.
So say no to no-reply e-mails in your app. Let your customers talk to you! Even if it’s hard work trying to answer everyone, it’s a damn sight better than covering your ears.
7 Comments
Completly agree, it’s een worse for maul that is sent to you, like a newsletter. If you won’t read my reply, you have no business sending me email IMO.
Posted by Marc Gear at 9:52 am on 1 February, 2010.
Great message in this post. While I think no-reply’s have some relevance in certain areas of an app (e.g. password reminder automation), they have no relevance at all in a support based function. If you are taking the trouble of providing a support service to your customers, which you should if you are taking their cash money(!), then to it properly!
Posted by Barney at 12:54 pm on 1 February, 2010.
Cheers, this post made me realise the stupidity of sending out comment notification emails from a no-reply. I wasn’t even concerned about managing the potential replies (with my traffic that would be optimistic), just blindly following convention.
Posted by Oisin at 4:43 pm on 1 February, 2010.
Hey Eoghan, I totally agree! In fact, I ranted about this on my blog once upon a time. I think most of this occurs from people just following others like the above commenter noted.
http://lesspostmoreget.com/2009/06/10/no-reply-emails/
Posted by Philip Crawford at 5:17 pm on 1 February, 2010.
Great post. This is something which absolutely kills the human aspect to an interaction with a product - You’ve inspired me to make sure it’s not done in any email we’re sending to our customers.
Posted by Dave Concannon at 10:17 pm on 1 February, 2010.
That interaction wasn’t weird.
Posted by Formal Casual at 4:07 am on 6 February, 2010.
While your overall point about the intimacy of customer service relationships is a good one, I should note that it’s a very troubling idea to get people into the habit of replying to email messages purporting to be from large corporations. To reduce the exposure of their customers to phishing attacks, responsible companies should reduce or eliminate links in emails, and downgrade them to little more than a 1-way notification. The customer should go to the website to interact with them. I would much rather see online service-ticket tracking and correspondence than something based around email.
Posted by Brad at 4:20 am on 6 February, 2010.
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Posted by No reply is better than no-reply at 4:51 am on 1 February, 2010
[...] Eoghan McCabe: Given the crappy copy and links in the message, after a quick scan, it’s not difficult to miss a key line or two and be left thinking you can hit reply and continue the conversation. After all, they originally asked me to e-mail them, they just replied to my mail, they ask me to “write back”, speak in the first person and they sign with a staff member’s name. I typed “Hi Scott, there must be some confusion. There is no another e-mail add—” before I noticed the “cannot accept incoming e-mail” line. [...]
Posted by Michael Tsai - Blog - No Reply Is Better Than No-Reply at 5:08 pm on 3 February, 2010