Yesterday evening (actually close to midnight Saturday night) I went online to check my mail to see if a subscriber or customer had a problem with anything.
There was a mail there from a customer, who quoted a full e-mail from me (as if I was too stupid to remember my own mails) and had added a new subject line:
"VERY DISAPPOINTED"
Yes, all caps. And "all caps" emails often end up in the spam folder.
I thought of the good old AOL user joke when I saw that, but read the man’s mail, and this is what it said:
"Britt
P
I can not open the file to,self help research. I was able to get the outline file and."
It often happens that I overlook emails, because frankly, I get hundreds of them daily.
That’s why I have a support desk, to make sure that customers get help.
But this guy was lucky. I saw his mail, and I replied as best I could, based on what he wrote:
Now, I had hopes that this would solve the man’s problem, but no.
Maybe he didn’t get the mail? Maybe it would have helped if he’d used the support desk I recommend?
I don’t know, but I just received this mail, again posted on top of another mail…
Britt
Very disappointed I need the research and the file won’t open, poor business practices to bounce the customer around! Please send research to me in another format!
Thx
NAME of Sender
Your help desk not helpful!
I’m not sure what he means by "help desk not helpful!" since he didn’t use it… I mean the lotto coupons I don’t buy don’t make a lot of money either 😉
I started to reply, but thought that maybe you wondered too, why I would "bounce the customer around!" and send you off to use my support desk instead of just writing me a mail.
And here’s why:
- Mail is not reliable. I often miss the mails I get, because they are lost within other mails, or they go straight to the spam folder.
- Mail is not reliable. See what happened to the mail I took time to write Saturday night to this customer? I had to find the product, unzip it for him, and mail it to him, because his technical knowledge didn’t allow him to unzip it himself. And he’s still "very disappointed" – why? I don’t know. I can only guess that he never received my mail. I have no way of knowing, because I’m not sure he gets my mails. If he’d used my support desk, we could have entered a dialog.
As for my support desk, I started out with a free script called Maian Support. Then I bought a license later to be able to change the templates. But if you’re a product creator, and you have the same email problem I do, then you can still get the support script for free. I highly recommend it.
Some customers even use it 😉