Why we no longer accept sales queries via email… and shockingly, how it helped our company grow.

As many of our customers will know, we stopped taking sales queries via email earlier this year. You can see the original post announcing this change on our forum here.

Why did we make this change? We had literally got the point where we could no longer cope with the volume of email messages we where receiving - 1000s of messages a month, with the volume growing more quickly than either sales or turnover. Our initial decision to make this change was based on nothing more than us crumbling under the weight of email. Sure, we could reply to all of them. If we never slept. Or saw friends. Or actually shipped orders :)

My initial feeling was to hire another sales person and to really focus on making quick email responses a selling point. But we soon realised that, because email volumes was growing more quickly than sales volumes, this would not be sustainable. So, we decided to try something daring - remove the sales email address from the site, put up an auto-responder informing our customers of alternative contact methods, and see what happened. We set up separate boxes for warranty claims and queries on order status, which we still accept via email, but stopped completely with sales emails. We redirected customers to our forums, to our live chat system, and encouraged them to phone us (how quaint).

So what happened? I’ll quote what I wrote at the time.

1. A large proportion of the emails we received, were emails where the client found the answer they where looking for and placed an order prior to us replying to the email. (Often a client would ask a question via email, then two minutes later we get an order from them, with a comment on the order saying “ignore my email”) Obviously, for these clients, there is no loss in service quality.

2. Many customers where emailing to confirm price levels and stock levels. We’ve made improvements to the website to make this information more obvious, and have noticed a decrease in the number of customers contacting us via phone / live chat to check this information.

3. Finally, we received a number of quote requests via emails. When we were taking sales requests via email, we noticed that a relatively low percentage of customers who sent quotes, went on to place orders. Many of these customers where either businesses looking for on-site support that we do not offer, or residential consumers purchasing low end computers - a market in which we are not very price competitive with large retail stores. At this point, all of these customers are contacting us via either live help, calling us, or posting on our forums. We have probably lost some customers who want an email quote, and won’t order without one, however we feel confident that our improvements above have vastly outweighed this, as can be seen by our sales.

That was written about two months after we closed our sales email inbox. Now, three months further down the line, do I still agree with my prior self? What else have we learnt?

• A lot of people send emails purely because it’s so easy. Instead of reading a page, they send an email. Instead of reading a FAQ, they send an email. And as with the above post, when they don’t get a reply in a few minutes, they re-read the site and answer their own question. This is a curious aspect of human nature.

• People also send email to re-assure themselves that you aren’t scammers. For these people, posting on our forums, chatting on live chat, or calling us actually fulfils their needs better.

• Email doesn’t scale effectively - as a one to one medium, the same questions are being answered again and again. However, our forum scales beautifully - many customers are finding the answers to their questions without even needing to post a question - it’s already been asked and answered!

Do I think we made the right decision? Yeah, I kinda do. Sure, we’ve had a few complaints, and I’m sure lost some customers - but the complaints have been vastly outweighed by compliments about other areas of our service (live chat, response times on non-sales emails) that we have been able to improve because we no longer live and breath sales emails. And overall, we’ve continued to grow over this time - if anything, I would say our decision has increased rather than decreased turnover.

The lesson learnt? We should all take a long hard look at the way we run our businesses - those things we believe to be critical are sometimes holding us back from approaching the problem in a different way. If you don’t do it, your competitors will.