A recent experience of trying to hire a car over the “royal wedding weekend” got me thinking about how important good electronic communication is with clients.
I was after a large mini-van or mini-bus for the Bank Holiday Monday and for one reason or another didn’t start looking until the Saturday. The first two companies I tried were the big national car hire chains, I started on their websites and for both it was clear that on the day I required the car they were closed at my local branch. Annoying for me, but at least I knew where I stood.
I moved onto some smaller local businesses, the next two had nice large adverts in the local business pages and indicated they provided the type of vehicle I was after. Both had prominent website urls on their adverts. So I visited the sites and got their contact details. As they had email addresses or web based contact forms I used these (although a Generation X’er myself I do seem to favour a lot of the communication forms of Generation Y!).
These companies then failed. Not only did they not respond to my email, they never acknowledged them at all. I know they received them as I ended up calling them by phone and they clearly knew of my query. Also they didn’t have the vehicles available either so a simple “Sorry no vehicles available email” would have taken 30 seconds!
The remaining local company I tried looked a bit more hopeful and they had online booking!
The order was taken and an automated confirmation received. I was wary though with it being a bank holiday so I emailed them to check they booking, after no reply in 24 hours I called by phone and got no reply. But the automated phone message gave no indication of the company being closed for the bank holiday, so although doubtful I had no reason to believe my car wouldn’t be their waiting for me.
Guess what though, it was closed! Worse still was the fact that a week later I have had no reply either email or phone from this company apologising for their error or even just acknowledging it!
Unbelievably a lot of companies seem to recognise some need to have a website and an email address but then treat them as a second class communication form over phone and face-to-face. Trouble is for them, unlike the boomer generation, the Y generation favours the electronic. Given the volume of email coming into law firms, it’s clear that a lot of lawyers get this and are comfortable with electronic communications. But there are a still some older lawyers who don’t and are quite happy to dictate emails for their secretary.
Regardless of which camp you’re in we still need to remind ourselves to acknowledge those emails. If we can deal with it immediately, do it and then get the email out of the inbox. If it can’t be dealt with quickly, acknowledge the receipt, add a task to deal with it later and get the email out of the inbox. As someone who has 90+ emails in their inbox at the end of today still, I know it’s easier said than done. Also clearly not all emails are from clients and need this kind of attention. But hopefully it’s obvious that we should try to avoid being the law firm that mirrors those firms above. At best your clients will be annoyed, at worst they’ll go somewhere else next time!
