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E-Writing Bulletin - Current Issue
The
E-Writing Bulletin
The Web
Newsletter On Writing In The Electronic
Age
This issue's featured
article:
Which Hotel Chain Does Customer
Service E-Mail Best?
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This issue's featured article:
Which Hotel Chain Does Customer
Service E-Mail Best?
Subject: Request for
info - room for disabled traveler - Labor Day
2008 Hello
- I'm
interested in making a hotel reservation for
my brother near Midway
Airport in Chicago on August 31 and September
1, 2008. (He uses a
wheelchair.) Does the [insert hotel name
here] have rooms for
handicapped travelers? If so, how do I
make a reservation? Thanks
– Jane
Doe |
Within two days of sending our query, we’d received responses from five hotel chains: Best Western, Marriott, La Quinta, Hyatt, and Hilton. The quality of the responses was uneven, to put it politely. To see which hotels provided excellent service and which bombed, download the hotels' e-mail responses and our comments (PDF).
Here’s a quick overview of customer service e-mail winners and losers.
Winners:
- Quick response: Best Western and Marriott answered within two hours. La Quinta was the quickest, answering within just one hour. Check our comments to see whether La Quinta’s response was quick and good, or just quick.
- Clear answer to our
question: Marriott wins. Here’s the
third sentence of Marriott’s reply:
“Handicapped accessible rooms are available at
all Marriott hotels in the U.S.”
- Polite, professional tone: All
five hotel chains used a customer-friendly
tone. In fact, four of the five began their
e-mails by thanking the customer!
- Grammar and spelling: Embarrassing errors slipped through in Best Western’s, Hilton’s, and La Quinta’s e-mails.
- A no-answer reply: Hilton never even mentioned accessible rooms or rooms for handicapped travelers.
- Incomprehensible “from”
lines:
Customers should be able to tell who’s writing
to them by looking at the “from” line.
But some of the hotel chains we tested included
unfamiliar abbreviations in the from line or
used a sender’s name customers won’t recognize.
(Who is internethamp@hiltonres.com,
anyway?)
Whose customer service e-mail should we test next?
Insurance companies? Online retailers? Software vendors? We’ll run another e-mail experiment this fall and we’d love your input. E-mail us at info@ewriteonline.com and let us know which industry we should test and give us a rough idea of the query you’d like us to send. In return for using your suggestion about industry and query, we’ll give you a free (and private) critique of the e-mail your company sends to customers.
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E-WRITE
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Leslie
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info@ewriteonline.com
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