Stop Using noreply | Hacker News Reader

Stop Using noreply

ryanhoover.me

85 pointsrrhoover33 comments

"I replied and we shared a short conversation where I learned the meaning behind the name Quibb. Fun. :) And she does this for all new users. Bravo, Sandi! As Sandi has demonstrated, the Internet doesn’t have to be faceless. We need to stop communicating with robots."

This idea doesn't scale very well. If you're a struggling little company that's trying to hold on to a handful of users (Quibb is currently "invite-only" [1]), it might be feasible. But a company that already has enough users to be successful can't afford to hire all the people it would take to personally interact with every user. Imagine how many people Facebook would need to hire to personally thank every new user for opening a Facebook account (in the hundreds of languages that Facebook users around the world speak).

[1] http://quibb.com/about

I don't agree. I've personally emailed every single one of our IgnitionDeck customers, about 20% of which reply. It takes maybe 2-3 minutes extra per reply. Initially, I used TextExpander, and later, Intercom.

These are paid customers though, so were I offering a free service I probably wouldn't have done so.

Care to share what software Intercom is? Don't seem to find it on typical Mac download sites or in the app store . . .

http://intercom.io It's great.

It really is. I think their pricing structure is a little off, but it's a service I gladly pay for and recommend. I met the guys at LessConf last year, and they're great people, so it's a win-win in my book.

I said the exact same thing yesterday but my comment never made it here (Internet connection blew up on me). This whole "stop using noreply" thing is just a bunch of silly hip dogma now. Soliciting feedback and cultivating relationships with customers is definitely important. Only a fool would argue otherwise but it simply doesn't scale. And there's much to be said about context and rules. A noreply email is usually meant as a one-way communication. There's no reason to reply to it and if by chance there is then make sure you give easy access to the proper channels.

I'm opening up my own site to the beta list in 10 days (shameless plug: https://writeapp.me) and I thought about noreply and I came up with this: Some emails are meant to or can reasonably be expected to generate feedback. Replies to those will be handled swiftly and efficiently. Others, like transactional emails the app generates warrant no reply. Changed your password? Okay, we'll click the link to reset it or ignore this email to keep it the same. Replies to such emails will be accepted but they'll be directed to a very low priority inbox.

The problem is that when you have X types of emails and X inboxes, accepting replies on all of them is an organization nightmare. There's a lot to be said for setting proper expectations. If you make sure to direct users to the appropriate channels from day 1 then you don't have to worry about support requests coming from marketing emails or transactional notification emails. Letting users reply to all emails and giving them personal attention no matter what they replied to from day 1 sets the expectation that they'll have that forever and are then entitled to it. There's a reason noreply is used. It's not because someone was an asshole and didn't want to interact with users. It was because its impractical at a certain point.

By all means make it a priority to get feedback and interact with users but just be careful and don't be short sighted about it.

The example in the post is actually a bad example. The author is saying not to use noreply and references an email that is in no way similar to any kind of noreply email youd normally get. He got an email from a founder. The context was personal. Why in the world would that ever come from a noreply address? The example would be far more compelling (yet still take a position I disagree with) if he had gotten a transactional email or a marketing email that he replied to. But he didn't. He got a personal email because of something he said online that was noticed by someone at the startup. Apples and oranges.

The post's point should have been simply to encourage startups to engage more with users and make them feel special. This post seems to have little to do with noreply email addresse at all. By taking a story about startups engaging with users and turning it into an anti-noreply article the real message is buried and becomes disagreeable.

I think it's possible to scale a personal approach to support.

Maybe, as Quibb grows, Sandi doesn't actually manually send each message. Maybe she sets up an autoresponder with a default welcome message. However, it's still possible to send automated messages in a personal way. Instead of the email coming from noreply@quibb.com, or even support@quibb.com (better), maybe Sandi continues to have the welcome emails sent from her personal company email. Maybe she continues to use a tone in that default message that suggests approachability. As you scale, there are always tricks you can use to make customers firmly believe you care.

Also worth considering: sure, Facebook don't personally interact with every new user, but you can be damn sure that they take a more personal approach when dealing with advertisers.

What you're describing and what the author describes isn't noreply email. A noreply message is a one-way communication that doesn't warrant a response and if it gets one will be sent to a low priority inbox. I'm 100% for your idea but what I take exception to is the idea that noreply emails are somehow wrong or bad. They're not. They're quite useful. This is where scale comes in. At a certain point you just can't accept replies to every email you send out because you somehow have to filter them so they get the attention of the proper person or department. There's lots of room for personalized auto responders and all that but somestimes one-way really does need to be one way. That doesn't mean bouncing replies if you get them nor does it mean literally naming the email address "noreply@". It just means drawing a line somewhere so that users know that you really do care about them but for you to be able to serve them as well, as quickly, and as efficiently as possible, they need to be in contact with such and such email or read the knowledge base articles at X URL. In the end I think that will make everyone happy.

Well, yeah, noreply emails are useful for the business, and I understand that. They're not very useful for the customer, though.

Customers want to feel as though there's a real person they can contact directly. They don't want to feel as though they'll simply be shunted endlessly from department from department. My opinion is that the customer shouldn't need to learn how your company is structured simply to make a one-off complaint or ask a question. The onus should be on the company to receive the support query and then pass it along to somebody who can answer it.

I'm aware this a less obviously scaleable approach to support. For some companies, it's not really tenable. In many cases, the value of a single customer may be so low that providing good support isn't worth it... it may be more valuable to simply ignore that customer until they leave. But for companies in which every customer is valuable, or could be valuable (Mailchimp, for example, or Zendesk), this kind of "inefficient" customer-centric support makes sense.

True, lots of ideas dont seem to scale. It is still worth trying, though, especially if you are well before the situation that would make this approach break. I write personalized thank you notes in my subscription service and it is one of the favorite parts for my subscribers.

The post talks about sending personal emails. While that may be possible for smaller companies it doesn't really scale. At some point a company will have to use more automated email.

However, I think that you should really consider whether email is an acceptable means of supporting customers/users. If it is, why not have Reply-To: support@example.com?

It has happened on several occasions that I have questions regarding an incoming email, but it's sent from noreply (with no Reply-To) so I can't respond directly. Instead I have to look for an email address or a form on their website, requiring a long detour.

On a similar topic from a recent experience...I recently got into a conversation with KLM about delayed luggage. You fill in a web form that emails them with your complaint. They reply to your email address. If you reply to their email, you get an automated email back saying that they didn't receive your response and that all information must be communicated via a web form.

So now you must go into your sent box, copy the email and then go to the link on the klm.com website. You find your reference number, put it in and then paste the text of your email into the text box...and hopefully get a reply. (It's been 3 days.)

It really amazes me that companies are so bad at communication.

I love that Sandi does this. However, it doesn't scale. I signed up on the 18th when her blog post about it hit HN. I didn't get a personal email from her but I had the expectation to after reading the post. :/

I'm trying to figure out how to make this type of thing scale beyond your first 100 customers, and I've come up with a few thoughts.

1. Don't create that expectation of a personal connection. This is the most common thing you see at large companies. I don't think this is a good way to do it.

2. Hire someone as the face of the company -- the community manager probably, and send a mix of automated and personal mail from them. But make them the face of the company. This is something I'm responsible for now. And it still has limits.

3. Randomly assign a contact person within the company for every signup. And automate the insertion of their signature in every email. This however has issues with turnover, and the voice of the emails.

So far, I think what works best is automated (but specific) emails from me, the CEO. And then introductions to the rest of the team for problem resolution.

I'd love to hear what others think works best.

Even if the reply-to just dumps responses into a customer support queue, that's better than 90% of mass mail is doing.

Separately, I think it's great if you can have all of your employees involved in the support and outreach process, but that's a cultural thing and thus a bit harder than changing a mail header.

Yes, I think all employees involved is a huge win. In our company of 3, we do that. But one thing that's problematic from the customer's point of view, is:

"Who should I contact to solve my problem?"

The ideal experience in my opinion is a single contact point, with the authority and knowledge to solve every issue you have.

That's of course unrealistic, but I want to find a way to approximate that. The closest thing I've heard is Alla Klein:

http://code.dblock.org/alla-klein-a-fake-person-in-charge-of...

My startup never uses no-reply and someone reads pretty much every reply.

But note that this is not zero cost. The time your support staff spends deleting out of office replies and spam is time they aren't helping real people.

It's trivial to filter out of office messages if you use a decent email program. The false positive rate should be as close to zero as you can get.

Reading every feedback email from every real user teaches you how to create better products. If you make it clear users can provide feedback, there's an opportunity from them.

I ask every single real person who leaves my service why they left, which translates to about 12 emails from me per week. Most of the time, the feedback isn't actionable, but 2-3 of every 50 emails translate to something I can use to make my product better.

It's definitely not easy to do at scale, if possible at all. I'm still in the early stages with the product, so at this point (and with this particular type of product) the personal, un-scalable approach makes sense. The style of email that I sent to Ryan, and the one that I describe in the post that he links to, is only for people that are arriving through 'warm' connections (e.g. a colleague told them about the site), versus arriving through twitter, search, etc. For completely cold connections, I use a slightly less personal approach. I shared a post about that here last week, and there were some great comments - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4527094. That method still requires some effort from a real person, but doesn't include any actual 'research'.

This is useful in some situations but a large amount of transactional email doesn't and shouldn't have replies made to it. As with almost all advice that you find in blog posts, it works in one situation but is presented as an answer to every situation. Instead of arguing in the comments about whether or not this would work for your company for every email, try and suggest places where this would be useful.

I don't think noreply is about not wanting people to respond to your messages. It is rather a solution for all the garbage you get back when sending out email to thousands of people. You will get many many mailer deamon mails for people who typed their addresses wrong or whose mailbox is full (yes, there are still webhosts that have a 20 MB limit apparently). Filtering all this stuff takes lots of effort and seems like a bad thing to spent time on when you can just use noreply and include a "Have questions? Email us at service@example.com" line.

Bounces should go to the "envelope from address", which is different than the from address in the actual email. The way I've set this up before had the envelope from address be "bounce-$user_id@companydomain.com" so that we could identify bad addresses, but any replies from humans go to someone directly.

You can also use the Reply-To header to achieve the same result.

Yes, in theory. Unless you run into a not-so-compliant mail daemon…

This is why Reply-To, Errors-To, From, MAIL-From, Sender, etc. are all separate headers.

I vaguely agree; when I see that wordy explanation about "this is sent from a blah blah replies won't be blah blah" I tend to read it uncharitably, even though I know why they do it. My first read of it, somewhat involuntarily, is along the lines of: wow, these people can't even deal with the use-case of someone replying to this email, and are so befuddled by the possibility that the best workaround they could think of was to tack on this wordy disclaimer in the email, begging people not to hit "reply".

I don't agree with this. Having worked on the product side of several larger scale email infrastructures, it's impossible to scale this correctly. Yes, we all want to talk less with robots and appreciate getting a reply from a human, but if you're a web company looking to grow your product to be used by millions, you can't get this to work while keeping your co-workers happy (when I discussed something similar with our community support team they looked at me like they wanted to kill me).

There might be a way to scale it by filtering messages and sending certain replies on certain topics, but then again, your support team will ask you where the reply address will redirect to. Who will manage that inbox? Who needs to reply those emails? Do you want to increase the load on your support guys even more?

This makes the rounds of the blogs every couple weeks, and yeah... If you use noreply@, you're going to negatively impact user engagement. But in reality, sometimes you just don't have time to talk to users. At least, not all of them.

I have time to provide good service to a limited number of my customers every day. Meaningless feel-good interactions reduce the number of meaningful interactions I can have. I check the no-reply inbox every couple days anyways, and in general the people who send email to that address instead of seeking out the support email on my homepage are the customers I'd rather lose. It's a good filter.

I once spent some time chatting with a guy who ran a handful of fire-and-forget IT side-businesses, including wifi/hotspot internet access.

His customer service philosophy was very simple: either you use and like the service, or he refunds the money. It wasn't altruism, it was self-interest. He didn't have time to do customer support, and was very blunt about it. Either customers corrected their own issues, or they were no longer customers. This was one of the ways he was able to have time for his several companies.

I agree. It doesn't require anything extra to use an email address that accepts replies. Even if they go into a dark hole and are never read, at least you aren't sending a message that you don't care what the receiver thinks.

When I receive a no reply, I assume that the company doesn't care about my opinion as it relates to their communication, and in that case, I share the sentiment. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The exception, I suppose, would be something like an Amazon email notifying me of related products.

It seems to me that well thought out email marketing should take responses into account as part of the funnel. That being said, I haven't seen any good examples besides just forwarding responses to a customer service queue, as rmaccloy mentions.

The point of email marketing is that it scales, and you can do testing. One on one communication is almost the opposite. Companies shouldn't have to choose between one or the other.

I think this is a bad idea for the user in the long run, perhaps not only for the user. Think about how long does it take you now to recoginze and (not) read noreply@ e-mails? How long will this take when they are actually directed to you? There's enough distractions on the internet already and if more companies start doing this it will probably result in another arms race.

My initial response was, "What about companies that send email to hundreds of thousands of recipients? Surely they can't always handle such a flood of direct replies." But if you don't have the resources to handle so many replies, then you probably shouldn't be sending email blasts to that many people in the first place.

Well, yes. If your email is sent such that you welcome replies, you don't use noreply@example.com.

I think this message is geared toward startups. But it's not explicit. It's a good point for startups to try to increase the understanding of their customers. But obviously is not relevant for companies with much larger reach.

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