Friday 19 July 2013

"noreply" is terrible customer service

A very popular trend in the industry is for generated e-mails to have a return address of "noreply@website". Personally, I find this to be terrible customer service, something we ought to nip in the bud before it becomes absolute standard across the industry and here's why.

Anyone who was schooled in an English country was likely taught the art of the English Language. Along with that, they were taught how to produce letters of a formal nature which is a solid skill for life and business. One key component of any mail worth responding to is the return address of the sender. Even automatically generated mail will have some address to which you can return something and it reach a human being.

So why should the web be any different? I know a lot of people who will ignore calls from unknown callers. Companies are aware of this and consequently you'll often get a number, even if it's a premium number or a switchboard, in order to lure you into answering the phone. "noreply" is such an impersonal and lazy approach the same as "unknown caller".

As an example, if I get an automatically generated e-mail from a train booking, the sender and return address is "noreply". What if there's a problem with the booking? I have to manually find the support address within the e-mail or, far worse, visit the website myself and waste my time sourcing the relevant department.

E-mails are handled by computers - if only there was some magical way of directing return e-mails to some spam filtering service and have the non-spam sent into a central inbox for the relevant department at a company... oh wait there is.

To put it simply: if I can't reply to your e-mail, auto-generated or not, you're not going to get much custom out of me.

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