General Etiquette > All In A Day's Work

S/O Email etiquette ... did you spell it right?

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elephantschild:
I get a lot of submissions to our company through email ... in fact, all submissions must be email, fax or snail mail so there's a record of them. (To combat the people who flub their press release and then blame us.)

First, though, people often call to find out the guidelines, who to send it to, etc.

The problem: I will give them my email address slowly, spelling it out, emphasizing a silent letter in my surname (let's say my name is Johneson ... folks don't expect that "e"), explicitly telling them about punctuation marks that are in all our work email addresses, etc.

And then, a week or two later, someone will call and say, "I never saw our submission! What happened?" 

One of the first things I do is ask about the email address, which they usually assert was correct. But then I'll go back over the address with them and they'll say, "Oh, I left out the 'e' " or "Oh, I used 'other punctuation mark!'" 

Problem is, then it's often too late. And I've had people get annoyed because "You should have called and told me you didn't get it!"  The thing is, we get a lot of calls for submissions, email submissions, etc. Dozens a day. I simply don't have time to keep track of all of them and babysit people by calling back to be sure they spelled everything correctly.

So, questions: Can you think of a clearer way for me to do this?  I do try to be very careful with it. Our email addresses here are a little quirky. (Corporate won't change them. We've asked.)

And what's a good, polite, helpful response to "You should have called and told me!"?  (Since it would probably be rude to say "Sir, I really don't have time to babysit every submission. If it was that important, you should have followed up before now.")  ::)

amylouky:
Can you set an autoreply, so that each submission gets a "Thank you, we've received your submission" email? Then you could tell the caller to be expecting this confirmation, and to call back if they don't receive it in x minutes/hours/whatever?

ClaireC79:
Could you do a receipt for all those you do get, and tell them that if they do not get a receipt then to assume you haven't got it and it won't be printed - ie throw the responsibility back to them

ShadowLady:
Maybe mention when the people are calling that it is their resposibility to make sure that you received the submission. 

But this means you will need to either do like AmyLouky and ClaireC79 suggested, and have an auto-reply email, or call every single submission to verify to the sender that you received it.  And that if they don't get either a call, or email, they should assume that you did not receive it.

Another thought, does your website have a link to the email address they should use?  I have the same issue here at my work, and I direct everyone to the website to click on the one specific link that should launch an email from whatever mail program they use, with the correct email address.

elephantschild:
All good ideas. Unfortunately, there's not a dedicated email for these submissions. We all use our emails for other things as well and I couldn't have one standard message. (I may suggest that we create one, but such things go through IT and tend to take a really long time to be approved.  :P)  I just started with this particular duty, so I might be able to get away with some revamping, though ...

Our website has such a link. It works ... sometimes. And I also deal with a lot of older people who aren't willing to go digging around on a website; many aren't all that keen on email, either. (Let's put it this way: I have a few things on my desk right now that were hand-written on lined notebook paper and simply dropped off at the front desk.)

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