What mistakes do people and robots make in letters?
Every day, robots and ordinary people write to me. In the topic, I’ll talk about stupid errors in letters that can be easily avoided. And also about how mail processing is arranged in our company.It will be about three types of letters:
- Internal from employee to employee.
- External from you to the counterparty of the company.
- External, written by a specially trained robot.
More paper - cleaner ass
Communication on the project can be meetings, letters and calls. Of these three channels, only letters are recorded: accordingly, you must personally duplicate the other two for the client. For example, after a telephone conversation with the statement of the problem, a brief summary of the dialogue is sent to the client. This verifies the correct understanding of the issue, plus the next step is established. This is very important to do in B2B and very cool as a reminder within the company. Tablets at meetings, by the way, are ideal to use for such reminders right in the process.
Did they eat a carrier pigeon?
It is important to maintain a sense of control over what is happening with the person you are texting with. It is expressed like this:
- In internal - a received letter without an answer is considered accepted for execution. If there is no answer, it means that you understood everything and agreed with everything (not obvious, so the details are below).
- In external ones, you must answer as quickly as possible. If you can’t answer within 24 hours, for example, you need to send a kind of confirmation receipt that the letter has been received, but you will answer a little later.
- The robot must send a letter to all important actions of the client. For example, for an order in an online store, this is acceptance, receipt of payment, beginning of formation, transfer to delivery, receipt.
What's next?
Each letter should contain the following action, that is, clearly indicate on which side the ball is now and what specifically needs to be done. This is a very important point that reduces the spread of chaos at times.
For example, for the internal one: “Ok, we do it, pass it on to the designer”, “Yes, we are interested, I will contact and make an appointment”, “There are not enough materials from you, we’ve crossed this and that.” For the outside: “We meet and discuss tomorrow,” “Accepted, go to the next part.” For the robot: “Hi, I am a special robot that takes orders. Now I will find a free operator and ask him to call you back for further details. I usually get it in 15 minutes. ”
Example. Recently, I ordered in the online store, which, after receiving the order, wrote something like "our operator will call you back within half an hour." The operator did not call back, I ordered the goods elsewhere. It was on Saturday, and the first store did not work. I would love to wait until Monday if I understood what was happening. In fact, the robot tricked me and robbed its creator of profits.
A special case of the first communication with the counterparty is to talk about the standard procedure. Give the person a little more information, describe what will happen in the future, let me understand and get comfortable - or give a mini version of the FAQ. After this, communication will go much easier. For example, when wholesalers write to us, we immediately talk about the most popular products, describe the buying process, give a short excursion into the topic “which audience chooses what”.
Picked up, screwed up, cheers!
We have three types of letters for the task:
- Confirmation of acceptance to work. It must be done immediately, especially for an external counterparty.
- A letter about the problem. When it suddenly becomes clear that the task is being performed abnormally, then any problem that delays or interferes with work should be immediately voiced. No one will ever know that you have a problem until you say it yourself. It is better to say earlier when the issue can be resolved than later, when it will be too late to rush about. No need to save up problems for the final project: they should be voiced immediately.
- The task is completed. The task can be linked with others in the project, and they are waiting for you. If you do and keep silent, the task will be considered unclosed and the project will slow down. When you did something and did not say it is bad. For example, at the moment when calls from St. Petersburg were sent to the Moscow call center, the operators did not yet know that the work was finished, so they were very surprised how far from the MKAD it was necessary to bring the game. You have not yet said that the task is closed, it is listed as hanging on you, plus often the letter about the end of the task is a signal “check the implementation”.
Silent - evil cormorant
When in the process of working on a project you do not respond to a letter with any instructions, this means that you completely agree with it. This is an important rule of internal corporate correspondence: there is no answer after confirming the task - it means everything is OK, and everything is in work, the process goes. For example, POS materials for an event are coordinated with the marketing department, event department and a designer who knows the requirements of the printing house. If after the letter to all three addresses only one person answers in the spirit of “Ok, we print” - the material is sent to the press in the morning without waiting for other opinions (yes, we check the mail every 6 hours at least, and often it is automatically picked up every 15 hours minutes).
RE: [159] Minor edits
Many use their inbox as a contact book. This is normal as long as the topic fits the correct one. It’s bad when the topic from the previous letter extends to a new dialogue: the level of chaos grows by an order of magnitude.
Hi, how-you-there?
Any of your counterparties most likely have a signature with a name. Do not be lazy to look in there and write instead of "We finished the work" "Alexei, we finished the work." At the first contact, it is very advisable to use the name, then - as you like, most importantly, do not get the person to "swot" the same phrases a la crazy sales manager.
Good day!
If you can’t determine what time of day it is, write “Hello!”. If you can, write “Good evening,” “Good morning,” and so on. Writing like a robot is awful. Even if a person lives in a different time zone, you can always write what he has now at that moment. You not only cease to be like an automaton, but also give one more important thing: a person who received a letter late can understand from the first line when it was sent. Of course, this is not always important, but sometimes it is useful.
The difference between “do” and “read”
If you are in the subject line of a letter, a specific reaction is required from you. If you are in the copy - you must be in the know, no action is required. Accordingly, when you are in a copy, you should not panic and ask “What is needed from me?”
Thank you for the customer base.
When sending out, you can often get a complete list of store counterparties (or course listeners, for example), when the sender indicates everyone in the copy. This is at least a leak of its base, and at the maximum - disclosure of confidential data.
Cap, who wrote this?
If you want something from a person or company, do not forget to include your mail, phone number and name in the signature. For example, our office manager receives 2-3 letters without a signature with mail stably on the day - and after 2-3 transfers within the company, it becomes unclear who exactly sent the letter (more precisely, to whom to write “Yes, we want to buy this”). At least one deal in my memory has broken so much.
Huh? What other money?
A man in the office receives from 30 to 400 letters a day. If there is no correspondence history directly below the text of the letter, it will be unrealistic to respond to it within a reasonable time. Yes, many email clients collect letters in chains, but not everyone does this.
I am able to print!
About 6-7% of B2B segment letters are written by people who, judging by the lack of capital letters, are in a hurry. This is about as bad as writing with errors: communication, it seems, does not interfere, but the opinion of the counterparty is declining.
Not abbr.!
Those who print with two fingers often do like this: “We have a limited number of them,” cutting it where it is not needed. It is clear that there is no global problem in this, but, again, the opinion of the counterparty is getting worse.
Dear passengers, keep calm !! 1
Sometimes I see double and triple exclamation marks in letters. In terms of meaning, there could also be a capsule, bold + underline + red or other similar discharge. In the sender’s head this is usually “pay attention”, and in the reader’s head there is already a hysterical cry. IMHO, in business letters two exclamation points in a row are considered panic and should be immediately suppressed.
By the way, sometimes this is also found in investments, for example, in price lists.
Ivanov, to the board!
In Russian, when you mention a surname and a name, the name should be the first: this is an elementary respect for the person to whom you write. By the way, it's worth checking your signature too. As suggested in the comments, foreigners should be guided by local features.
My name is James. James iPad
Different communicators like to embed their signatures in letters. Owners of top glands often leave them. It is logical to edit autosignature to remove unnecessary show-offs. I note that sometimes such signatures are useful, especially when people inside the company are in frequent trips.
Yoda writes the master to you
Very rarely, but still sometimes letters come with the answer at the very bottom after the whole multi-screen history of correspondence. This is very inconvenient, so try to answer all the same at the very beginning. In my memory, once thanks to this "iodine-style" important information about the deal was missed.
Woodpecker, this is a woodpecker, as you hear, I am a woodpecker, welcome.
The signature after the first letter, in theory, is not needed. If it is big - especially. It’s good when it is put in correspondence after the whole story, it’s bad if it hits every letter in the brain.
Here's another note for a well-mannered robot
- Mail is an authorization tool. For many services, where a user case involves one-time rare entries, it is often very convenient to support the mechanics of direct execution of actions. For example, every time you log in to FB incorrectly, you receive a letter with a one-time login link as usual (without intermediate forms and time losses).
- If the letter refers to information from the site - there should always be a specific link (and not “you can easily find it ...”). Appreciate user time.
- Letters must be written humanly. In the sense that positive and simple spoken language are pluses. “You ordered 21 units” is bad.
- Any letter can be answered by a living person. Accordingly, this should not be noreply@myshop.ru, but sales@myshop.ru and so on.
- It’s good if the automatic letter clearly tells who it is, why it came and how to turn it off (if it is periodic).
Heated discussion
I always liked simple trackers. In Mosigre we tried such systems several times, but mail turned out to be much more convenient and understandable. The only problem is long collective discussions of the problem. When the topic requires heated discussion, there are a lot of people in the copy and there are chances that the answers will go to those letters that do not contain the latest occurrences of the story, we switch from the mail to the inbox of the blog with branches according to the type of comments here. This is many times more convenient, but not always clear for those who participate in such an event for the first time.
Please give me a look at your rake
Hope you found something useful. Now I ask you to share in the comments your rules of internal etiquette, interesting developments and jambs seen in other people's letters.