[BLOG] Email etiquette in the tech world

primesuspect

I used to work at a newspaper. In my time in the press world, one thing I learned about was the etiquette of contact. People would write letters, type letters, email, call, and even fax us for various reasons. No matter what, we always gave them the courtesy of a response.

We used to have this conspiracy-theorist-kinda guy who would hand write crazy letters and mail them to us all the time, in hopes of being published. We never published a single one, but we ALWAYS sent him a letter back thanking him for his submission. It just seemed like a nice thing to do.

I went on to a different career path for a while, but now I find myself back in the journalism world. However, this time I'M the one writing the letters. I send emails to various companies and individuals in my daily work of trying to bring tech coverage to our readers, acquire review samples for our writers, and conducting business with advertisers, etc; stuff that seems really mundane and normal for a company like ours. Lately, though, I've noticed a strange trend.

At first I thought it was because some of the companies I deal with are in China or Taiwan and I was dealing with cultural or language barriers. I let things slide.

Then I thought it was because maybe we were too "small" for some of the companies I was trying to contact.

Now, I think "people are just plain rude".

This trend that I'm talking about is the fact that my emails and phone calls often fail to be returned to me or even acknowledged. I just don't get it. At the very least, I should get a form letter saying "thank you for contacting us." Even though it's impersonal, it still gives me comfort in knowing that my response was received in some fashion, even if by a machine. It would be grand to hear a human response, from a.. you know, real person. Clearly I am expecting too much.

I was dealing with a large company a couple of months ago; many of our communications were via telephone and voicemail. I was simply stunned at the complete lack of business etiquette: my contact routinely failed to return phone calls. At one point it got so bad that I called one of his associates. Ostensibly, it was to find out what the hell was going on, but in a way, I was ratting him out. Sure enough I got a call back from him just a few minutes later, apologizing and brushing it off as if it were no big deal.

More recently, I sent a product review request to three very large tech companies. These are not fly-by-night "Beetle Flower Cherry Blossom Technologies" random-hardware-in-China companies. These are major, publicly traded firms with global presence. It has been two days now, and I have not received ANY sort of acknowledgment from any of them. I almost think I'm living in crazyland sometimes, but this pattern is too hard to ignore. I've had to go through some pretty crazy hoops and be extremely persistent to get through to some of these companies sometimes.

Is it just the tech industry? Or is this a pattern in other areas of business?

So here's my thought for the day: If you, in your work, are being contacted by people, for any reason, please, at LEAST acknowledge them. Let them know that you've received their communication, even if you don't want to or can't help them. Figure out a gracious way to thank them for taking the time to contact you.

Do it for my sake.

BuddyJ

As painful as it is for requests to be frequently met with silence, I learned the hard way that silence doesn't always mean inaction. I contacted a large, popular company to request some products for review samples with the intent of having them go to one of our writers. The request was met with silence, so I assumed the company was blowing us off as usual.

Four weeks later I had a box with two of the products I'd suggested we review sitting on my doorstep. A week after that, I had another box with the third product I'd inquired about. Shipping both boxes to the reviewer cost me $70. I lost money and the reviews were delayed thanks to their failure to communicate, but we still ended up with good site content.

primesuspect

As a follow up to this, I had two very POSITIVE experiences today, one with Dell and the other with Mushkin. Both of them contacted me promptly and were eager to help.

Shorty

It's prevalent outside of journalism. The lack of professional communication in the IT industry is so common. I have recently been hounding a hardware manufacturer about their devices we currently have. We want to renew a contract. Yes, that's correct... WE WANT TO GIVE THEM MONEY.

Email and phone contacts have proven useless. It seems strange that they send me promotional marketing material/spam by email but yet don't want a nice support contract renewed. The contract runs into the thousands and chances are we will never use it. We just have it incase (such is the nature of enterprise IT). A simple "thank you for your email, we will contact you shortly" would be nice. Manners cost nothing in this world no matter who you are.

Linc

This is something that frequently annoys me... and then I find that email at the bottom of my inbox I totally forgot about