I ran into a problem Saturday with one of my apps and emailed the support team for help. After sending my email, I immediately got a confirmation email back, which is a good thing. Being the support geek that I am, I take the time to read through them to see what kind of language the other team’s using. And this time, I came across a true gem.
If this is an emergency and needs an urgent reply, email us at urgent-reply@myapp.com.
Kind of a cool idea, right? It helps prioritize which emails to be working on. My only hesitation would be in how many customers use it for non-urgent replies thinking they can just skip ahead of the line. I’ve emailed the team to see if they can share some info so hopefully I’ll be able to find out!
Have you seen a urgent reply email address like this in the wild? Good idea or bad?
I would say it’s a bad idea, but now I’m curious about their response. I’m also wondering if many users read the whole mail like you did.
Probably not. I’m weird in that I like to read them. 🙂
It’s a good idea in a perfect world but it is a bad idea in this world.
The biggest problem is that our expectations of “urgent issues” are almost never the same as customer’s definition of “urgent issues”. N
Definitely true on those expectations. Locked out of my account would be urgent. Really cool feature idea – not so urgent even if it is really cool.
The thing is, these people are already going to cause trouble. They’re the ones who email your CEO, your boss, and the support address…then call the company and send you a fax. I think the downside of giving them an “urgent” channel (where you can just reply and say “this isn’t urgent, but we’ll get to it first thing on Monday”) is outweighed by the benefit for people with actually-urgent issues.
I love this so much. RapidBuyr does this as well, and they told me that they get surprisingly little abuse. I think it actually even sends a text to their head of support.
A text to the support lead? That’s a pretty cool idea. Being available to your customers like this is always a win.