Agile Business Navigator

One of my clients experienced an issue with the lack of email communication follow up. You've had it happen to you. The client says "I sent you x emails and I never heard back from you." It may have cost a sale, a lead or just an extra bit of email fur flying back and forth until the issue was cleared up.

Its kind of like the 'Check is in the mail' routine. How can anyone guarantee that an email that you or a client sends will be received by you?

There's the ever present Spam pile - where emails get entangled in your particular spam solution. It sits in there until you take a gander and find it - much later then it was needed. It may bounce. You're on vacation and your email box fills up - the email gets bounced. You have no record of it bouncing and the sender missed the bounce message. You may have been delete finger happy and missed the email as an important one - off it went to the trash. Your email server or client may have hiccupped and lost the email. You may have just been plain too busy to deal with the issue and it went into your do later pile. It never came to the top of the pile - until it was too late.
Or, the one I see most often, I sent you four emails and you never responded sounds a lot better then I forgot to send you the email you requested.

So how do you handle a hungry email problem like this?

On one side, yours, you can handle it by having a system for follow up emails. You send an email with a request for a reply and your system follows it up by reminding you that you haven't received a reply yet. Delegate a task and your system flags the email as something you need to check on after a certain date.

On the other side, how do you make sure you receive all your emails?

Check your spam solution. What happens to people you don't know that send you an email? Do they go into the spam pile automatically? If you rely on leads coming in that can be a disaster. But so can 200 spam emails a day. If you have a rule based system - you can get pretty fancy with spam detection. You might think about leaving the rules on for "true spam" and having people that you don't know flow into your email inbox. You'll increase your spam, but you can always mark the ones that slip through and they'll be caught next time.

If you're on a limited email account - one that gives you low amounts of space - most corporate accounts, make sure you keep your mail box clean, especially if you're headed out. If you start getting bounce complaints - check your account - I'll bet you've got old mail stored on the server.

I'm still waiting for the secretarial email client - the one that will remind me to do my follow ups, let me know when there's an issue with an email. Wouldn't it be great - Kim - this one looks like spam to me - Press S to have him marked for life with a huge S on his forehead or Press H to send him straight to hell. By the way - you have 15 emails that need follow ups, your mom wants you to call her and the house needs bread and milk.

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