I’m looking for two things for my business just now, one a product and the other is a service and I can’t find them locally or in my normal contact base so I have been doing a bit of Googling and the like to find some potential suppliers.
It’s fantastic – straight to potential suppliers websites I go and have a little look around see that they do what I am interested in and then I find (sometimes not so easily) the “contact us” page – that’s where two things can happen – either there is a prescriptive form to fill in that doesn’t really quite fit who I am or what I am looking for or, often, there is the option to email “enquiries@______” So far so good, but the problem is that out of the ten or so emails that I have sent to different companies “enquiries@” over the past three months I have had only three responses. The three that came back did so within 24 hours, asked lots of questions to understand what I was looking for and hey, guess who’s getting the sales.
Now I have got that off my chest here is the point of my ramblings this week –if you owned a shop you certainly wouldn’t keep your door locked to turn customers away– but these companies not responding to “enquiries@” emails are, in this modern age of on-line business, doing just that.Interestingly of the seven emails that remain unanswered I got four read receipts which is even worse than just thinking the emails were not actually being delivered to a person. Four companies I would now never use and would positively steer people away from. Some of these are not small companies either – in fact the SME’s are the ones that tend to get this right
For most businesses operating today a web page is the front door to the shop and its becoming the customers first point of contact, their first impression. That said, I am in the process of getting my own webpage revamped just now because it’s not so flash – but I like to think we do answer our enquiries emails at least.
Back soon with more Telco ramblings.
