Tom AustinHarumph! Have you ever noticed all the emails that you receive that say “Do not reply to this email”?
I bought a new car from a US big three manufacturer in October — and have been inundated with satisfaction surveys offered via email — email to which I can’t respond. If I could, I’d tell them to stop sending me these emails!
I buy my airline tickets through a really big travel-related firm with strong corporate presence. They send me emails with, for example, invoices and itineraries, warning “This email box is unmonitored”.
I rented a car from a new upstart whose reservation confirmation says “Do not reply to this email!”
I just received a “complaint” from my corporate travel expense processing application warning me I had not filed a report for an expense charged to my corporate credit card and the charged item was now 15 days old. Could I ask them to stop harassing me until I got back from the end of my 17 day trip? Not likely — you guessed it, didn’t you? The email complaint warned “Do not reply to this email”.
Amongst us, we’re working on a prediction about the business impact of firms not paying attention to social media. But wait a minute. What about firms that don’t want to pay attention to email either?
There is really no excuse for this insensitive approach. Firms can build in a special reply-to address that will route your reply to customer service (if they really have such a thing). Lack of attention to this opportunity suggests to me, as an individual, that they don’t care.
Of course, this is not an official Gartner position. It’s a personal take.
What if we set up rules in our email clients to automatically delete all emails that say “Do not reply to this email”?
Replies welcome…
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