Email etiquette for companies

We're currently in the throes of trying to find a new plumber (our old one has been taken over by a large company which seems to have turned it into a bunch of cowboys). Plumbers and builders seem almost ideal users of email for contact, as small businesses where the work means you're rarely in a central location - or at least, they would be if they were able to use it. Ring a plumber's listed number during the day and you probably get a family member who can't help you. Ring their mobile, if they list one, and you either get them in the middle of doing something and unable to concentrate, take down your information, and certainly not knowing when they'd be free to do something. A text would be too short to say what needs to be said (because of allergies, anyone who visits the house, even to quickly look at things before providing an estimate, needs to be a non-smoker, and not wearing aftershave or scented deodorant). Ring in the evening, and they don't want to talk about work and have other things going on. Email doesn't have to be dealt with instantly, and the information provided by the other person is not going to be lost because you haven't got a spare hand to get a pen and paper. The problem is presumably the level of written English and technical know-how needed to work with email. This has meant that we've emailed five or six plumbers over the last ten days, and got no responses whatsoever. This is the reason for my first principle of email etiquette for companies:

If you list an email address as a means of contact, it is important to respond to messages in a timely manner.


When contacting bigger companies, you often get an automated instant(ish) reply, along the lines of "Your message has been received and is important to us. We aim to respond to you within seven working days." followed by a corporate disclaimer, and, quite often, an instruction not to reply to the automailer address. This at least means that the potential customer knows that their email has been received, but is itself not terribly helpful: it is the email equivalent of a call centre's "Your call is important to us. All our operators are busy at the moment, but we will answer your call as soon as someone is available. Please hold." (At least the email doesn't come with muzak to irritate you while you wait.)

My issue with this is that seven days is a long time to wait for a response to what is often a simple query, like being on hold for an hour (something which is thankfully much less common now than it was a decade ago). It does seem to be the time period which is used for this purpose, and is obviously intended to make sure that there is no real likelihood that the response will take longer than the time given (though I have even had this happen to me). It's also a time period which I have consistently seen ever since I first emailed a corporate address of this sort, which must be some time in 1995. Listen: it's 2012 now. Move on. You can do better now, and if you can't, give up: you're never going to make it into the twenty first century. It should surely be possible, when there is more than one person whose job includes monitoring a general query email account, to have a basic response from a human being by the end of the next working day, even if that is just "I can't answer your email fully now, but I am working on it." So here is my second principle of email etiquette for companies:

A timely response to an email  means by the end of the next working day for a company with more than one or two employees. And this response should come from a human being.


A problem which I have often encountered with email is that people do not respond to more than the first paragraph. An email is not a text message, and it can (in case you haven't noticed) contain more than one paragraph, more than one question. It is extremely irritating to have to email back and say "Great answer to the first question, but you don't seem to have noticed the rest of the email". And it's sensible when someone does as we do and give extra conditions such as sending a non-smoking employee to a meeting to indicate that this has been taken in. Thus, my third and final principle:

Read the whole of the message, and make it clear that you have done so in your reply.


The overriding thing to remember is that people who are sending you queries are interested in your company, which makes them much more likely to be future/continuing customers than people you send marketing to or who might happen across your website and then go away again. So they should be important to you, and if you can make their experience with your company better from the start, do so.