The e-mail response, I have now started avoiding companies that do not respond to e-mail, or e-mail me wanting me call them, so that they can deal with my request. The car insurance variety spring to mind. I am not interested in spending my day on the phone, I don’ t have time like that to waste. What I do want from a company, is a company that can respond to me in an intelligent way after I sending in an e-mail with optimistically intelligent information to them.
The classic case in point, was the insurance company that got all the necessary details from me over a e-mail and ended up asking me the same questions again over the same e-mail tread. That was the end of my interest in dealing with that company because if someone can’t read an e-mail then they certainly handle my car insurance.
If a company cannot read and decipher the information sent in an e-mail, or cannot give its employees leeway to make a judgment call on e-mail and how to respond then do you want to deal with that company. Does it question a company’s online presence and data handling structures? I can illustrate this with the case of a insurance company sending me there web-form off the web, but in a e-mail from, they already had the details in the initial e-mail from me. Now from a data handling and business process, web-forms are the way to go, but old business rules still apply, as in the ability to respond to an e-mail if you have a staff that are dedicated to it.