The info@ Address Everyone Reads and Nobody Answers

Read on four phones

The address on the van is info@, and so is the one in the website footer, on the business cards and at the bottom of every invoice.

Messages to it arrive on four phones: the owner's, the office manager's, the dispatcher's and the bookkeeper's.

Everyone reads it. Each person sees a quote request, assumes one of the others has dealt with it, and moves on.

The customer waits a day, then two, then calls the next company in the search results. Nobody at the business ever learns the message was missed.

Why a shared address goes unanswered

• Everyone can see it, so nobody feels it is theirs.
• Opening a message can mark it read on every phone at once.
• Replies leave from personal addresses, where nobody else can see them.
• Spam and supplier mail bury the enquiries that matter.
• Nobody has promised how quickly anyone replies.

The second catches careful people. Open a message between jobs, meaning to deal with it tonight, and it stops looking new for everyone else as well.

Two common setups, two failures

Most shared addresses work in one of two ways. Either everyone signs in to the same mailbox, or the address forwards a copy to several personal inboxes.

In a single mailbox, a message opened once looks handled to everyone, whether or not anyone replied.

With forwarding, each person has a private copy. One may reply, but the others cannot see that, so either nobody answers or two people do, sometimes with different prices.

Both setups hide the one fact that matters: whether this customer has had an answer yet.

Decide who owns the inbox

Owning the inbox does not mean answering everything. It means one named person makes sure every message gets a reply, or a clear hand-off to someone who will give one.

For most small businesses that is whoever is in the office on a given day, with a named backup for holidays and sick days.

Write it down: who owns it on weekdays, who covers weekends if anyone does, and what happens when the owner is away.

A rota pinned by the office phone does more than any software. Software only helps once somebody is responsible.

A worked example

A portable toilet rental company with three trucks prints info@ on the trucks, the website and the door of every unit it places at building sites, festivals and weddings.

The address forwarded to the owner, the dispatcher and the office manager. Event enquiries, service complaints from site supervisors and spam all arrived the same way.

In February a wedding planner asked for six units and a handwashing station for a June weekend. All three read it on their phones that afternoon.

The office manager assumed the dispatcher, who takes bookings, would reply. The dispatcher assumed the owner would, because it looked like a large order. Nine days later the planner wrote to say she had booked elsewhere.

The fix took an afternoon. Forwarding became one shared mailbox, the dispatcher owns it on weekdays and the owner on weekends, and every reply goes out from info@ so the others can see it.

An automatic reply now says when to expect an answer, and gives the phone number for a unit that needs servicing today.

Reply from the shared address

Replies sent from personal addresses are the main reason nobody can tell what has been answered.

Set up everyone who covers the inbox to send as info@, or at least to copy it on every reply. Then the answer sits beside the question.

It also keeps the conversation with the business when someone leaves, rather than in a former employee's personal inbox.

G Suite and Office 365 both offer ways to share one mailbox and send from it. Whoever manages your email can set it up properly in an hour or two.

Show what is still waiting

Reading a message is not the same as dealing with it, so the inbox needs a way to show the difference.

The simplest version is folders or labels: waiting on a quote, waiting on the customer, done. Anything still sitting in the inbox has not been handled.

A business with heavy volume may want a simple ticketing tool later. Folders are enough to start.

Promise a response time you can keep

Customers rarely need an instant answer. They need to know when one will come.

Pick a promise the business can keep in its worst normal week, such as a reply before the close of the following business day, and put it on the contact page.

Repeat it in an automatic reply, with the phone number for anything urgent. That one message turns a silent wait into a known one.

Then keep it. A published promise that is broken is worse than none, because the customer now has a deadline to be disappointed by.

Clear the clutter first

Enquiries are easier to miss when they sit among invoices, supplier newsletters and spam.

Move billing and supplier mail to its own address, unsubscribe from newsletters nobody reads, and let a filter file the rest.

Check where the website's contact form delivers, too. On many sites it lands in the same inbox, and form messages are a common casualty of spam filters.

Then send a test enquiry, through the form and to the address itself, from a personal account late on a Friday. When the reply arrives is the honest measure.

The counter-case

For a business run by one person the job is smaller. The info@ address is simply the owner's inbox with a tidier name, and the rule that matters is the response time.

A business with a busy customer service desk probably has a ticketing system already. The question there is whether the address printed on the vans leads into it.

And some trades get nearly everything by phone, where the voicemail deserves this attention more than the inbox does.

For everyone in between: one named owner, replies sent from the shared address, and a promise customers can rely on.

By Friday

1. List everyone who reads info@ today.
2. Name one owner for each day of the week.
3. Send every reply from the shared address.
4. Add folders for waiting and done.
5. Publish a response time on the contact page.
6. Set an automatic reply with the phone number.
7. Send a test enquiry late on Friday.

Step two holds up the other six. Folders, replies and promises all need a person behind them, and an inbox that belongs to everyone belongs to no one.

Replies to the newsletter land in the same inbox, and how the newsletter itself arrives is covered in newsletters that fall apart in Outlook.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.