Use the email

I happen to saw a social media post of someone making a fuss of how hard it is to report a technical problem on a product. It was directed towards Indonesian e-commerce platform, Blibli.

They tried 3 different methods:

In-app customer service live chat. Which is not sufficient with its many limitations.
Through a friend at the said product service department. Which unluckily, no longer work there and just direct the queries to customer support.
Through another friend that currently works there. Who proceeds to ask for the detailed problem.

What is the similarities of those 3 methods? All of it is some kind of synchronous communication.

What is synchronous communication?

Synchronous communication is when people wait for each other to talk. It's useful when you're dealing with things that would need to be taken immediately:

"What's for lunch?"
"Which road should I take?"

It's also useful in a group environment where you want to make a great number of people involved is voicing their thoughts rather than small amount of vocal person with the rest being passive; i.e. meetings. The purpose is to get a response.

But if there's synchronous, there would be asynchronous then? Yes.

What is asynchronous communication?

When the subject of matter being discussed requires some thinking, asynchronous communication is more suitably used. Rather than going back and forth of question and answer, asynchronous form requires the communication initiator to provide all the necessary information they got. It also allows the participant to digest the message. These are some forms of asynchronous communication:

Documentation
Announcement
Email
Article on your own website (like this)

The purpose is to get information through rather than getting a response. Which means, replies are optional.

Using both forms

Doesn't it means it sucks because there would be no replies? I want replies.

Well, these form of communication is not exclusive to each other. People are bringing up documentation into the meeting, too. Taking the lunch example, you can make a list of lunch that you'd prefer, a form of asynchronous communication:

Spicy fried chicken
Beef soup
Omelette
Overnight oatmeal that I made 2 days ago

Hand it to the other person, and say: "These are the food that I'd prefer for lunch. I'm also open to other options. What do you want for lunch?"

Same with the road example, you could have prepared an option of route beforehand, and decides later depending on current traffic. You might get, "Don't take that route, there were potholes few days ago." An information you don't know beforehand when you were planning the routes.

But why emails?

Back to the title and the main reasoning I made this post.

You can use any kind of communication platform with asynchronous communication. But not everyone knows or even used to it. There are many times I treated instant messaging as an asynchronous communication, thoroughly explaining my intention to the other parties, only to have them disregard the whole messages and ask the same question that can be answered earlier.

You can also use social media posts as a way of asynchronous communication. You want to spread information anyway, response is just a plus. But social media posts are not optimal way of getting through information. It is owned by the corporation. You accept their term of services, your content is not yours. Your post and comments can be deleted any time, and no one of your intended recipients may see it. Thus defeating the purpose of spreading information. If you were complaining about a powerful entity, they can even force the social media corporation to delete your complaints.

Now back to emails. It is an open standard. Any company valuing their customer would have a customer care mail address set up properly, and have it mentioned in the main page. They would also keep mentioning it any times they could. Emails is also stored in both the writer's end, and the recipient's end, making you own your sent emails, yet also making the recipient own the emails they received. This "immutability" makes most people think twice about sending an email. Which also makes people dislike emails because it force them to not make mistakes.

Just use emails!

Mistakes happen, do it anyway! There been countless of times I forgot to include piece of information when sending emails. I also use emails to ask and complain about product a lot. But the worst thing that ever happens is that I don't get replies. If you really want replies, you could follow up and mention the emails using synchronous way.

So, if there's not much downside of using email, why don't you?

View this page on gemini! (Same content, just different protocol.)

gemini://bentinata.com/log/use-the-email/