What part of “No-reply” don’t you understand?

15Feb6

Scenario

No-reply

The application sends out automated emails with links to a report that was requested by the user and created by the application. The sender address is 'no-reply@company.com' and obviously not meant to receive any further correspondence.

As it turns out, this exact no-reply email alias receives 'feedback' almost on a daily basis, some valuable and constructive, others from painfully true to filled with hatred, meaningless and doubtful.

Here an example:

Thx….this rocks……I am soooo gonna use u for this shit

What should we do with this answer?

Learn!

It is important that you hear something... anything... that you give your users a channel to voice their experience from which you can/should learn and grow. Don't label them 'stupid' just because they "didn't get it", all the opposite, maybe YOU didn't get it because a reply to an incoming email seems intuitive and picking up the phone or opening a web browser with a link to a feedback form isn't.

Lessons

So what can be learned from something seemingly unwanted - or to say it differently: not anticipated?

Take your customers serious.
Turn supposedly unwanted correspondence into contextual insight (observations drawn from data that resonates with an understanding of the business).
Turn them into business opportunities. Let them help you make better and faster decisions or simply improve the quality and perception of your application.
Optimize your automated emails following the guidelines for transactional email

Do it like Facebook. When Facebook realized that their users reply to email notifications about let's say comments on a picture of them, they simply turned those replies into a comment on the comment.
On the downside, less users go to the actual site to post the comment and continue using the service but on the upside the communication doesn't stop and becomes more real-time and valuable. A little give is a little more take I would say. Right on!

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About Michael Gaigg

Michael Gaigg is a User Interface Expert at Esri. He is the team lead of the UI Engineering group in Professional Services and has been designing map applications for over 8 years.

Tagged as: answer, automated, contextual insight, correspondence, email, facebook, learn, no-reply, transactional Leave a comment

Comments (6) Trackbacks (1) ( subscribe to comments on this post )

jessicab
February 16th, 2010 - 15:59

hahaha that case sounds familiar to me Anyways, I know what you mean about the feedback, but honestly I think most of the times users don't get the 'no reply' message because they are not tech savvies and don't know what it means… or maybe they are just silly!!

( REPLY )
- Michael Gaigg
  February 17th, 2010 - 09:58
  
  Good luck with your business venture!
  I mean, am I silly when after going to Starbucks for years and years I still don't understand that 'medium' size is venti or whatever it is? Is it just me? Or is it just not intuitive?
  Do you think I would still go to Starbucks if the waiter told me only once how stupid I am that I still don't know what venti means?
  
  ( REPLY )
Wilburn Zierk
February 19th, 2010 - 14:30

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August 16th, 2010 - 19:05

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Michaela Chatman
February 26th, 2011 - 00:34

I found this blog because I was looking for an image to use on my blog. I was looking for something about no reply. This image popped up with the x over the mouth. I didn't read your article until after I finished writing mine. I didn't want to become tainted.

Great points! I agree with everything. I just didn't think about how facebook groups may not lead people back to the original content. They will just respond right on facebook. One thing you could do, which may be tiresome, but maybe you could just respond with a thank you and then asking them to cut and paste on your blog or website.

I suggested that small business use facebook as their forum. If you don't have the funds or the traffic to create a massive forum, starting a small one on facebook might help. I guess you could also go to ning, but it looks like they are fading fast.

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