A customer recently emailed me that they hadn’t gotten their CD key in the email and also needed to update the address on their CD delivery. I sent them the following:
It appears that your main email account (redacted@redacted.com) is full of emails and as a result cannot receive any more. I am sending this to your secondary email account in the hope that it reaches you. You will find your Registration Key and instructions beneath my signature.
I will contact the company which processes shipping for me and make sure they send the CD to
123 Main Street
Apt #123
Anywhere, US 12345
instead of to your address in Big City.
Regards,
Patrick McKenzie
Dear (customer),
Thank you for your purchase of Bingo Card Creator. This email contains your registration code — please save it for your records. If you ever lose your code, you can contact us at support@bingocardcreator.com or through our website and we’ll happily look it up for you.
You have also purchased a CD. We will attempt to ship this within the next business day. After that, it generally takes 2-4 days to arrive depending on where you live, if you are in the continental United States. If you are not, send an email to support@bingocardcreator.com and we can give you a better estimate as to when it will arrive.
You will need to enter this registration code into your software to unlock its full functionality. You can do this by selecting Purchase Now from the menu bar, and then select Enter Registration Key.
Your Registration Key is BINGO-12345-12345 .
Assuming you were previously using the trial version of our software, you don’t need to download anything, but if you wish to make sure your software is up to date go to our website (http://www.bingocardcreator.com) and click “Download Free Trial” and follow the onscreen instructions. Note that if you have already put in your registration code no matter how many times you use that installer your software should stay registered, so feel free to update it at your leisure.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@bingocardcreator.com . Thanks again for your business.
Regards,
Patrick McKenzie
BingoCardCreator.com
Now, I think that is a fairly easy to understand email. It should resolve the problem. So imagine my suprise this morning when I get another email from the same customer saying “Well, I cleared out my email and checked again, but couldn’t find the registration code. So I ordered it again. Could you cancel the first order?”
I’m sort of loathe to yank back the order from SwiftCD (a manual process) not 12 hours after having to yank another order from them (the first, due to the botched address). No sense making too much extra work for them.
So I’m out an extra $5 for the second CD, because my customer apparently did not understand that my first email resolved their issue. That is irksome… and I haven’t mentioned it to the customer, and won’t, aside from to say “Of course I can do that for you. You will end up receiving two CDs — feel free to discard the one you don’t need.” A certain amount of minor irritations and miscommunications are par for the course.
Sidenote: SwiftCD has been incredibly understanding of my support needs (which include periodically yanking orders and retroactively changing addresses) and unfailingly fast and professional in dealing with them. If you need decently priced CDs stamped and shipped off to anywhere, they get my unwavering recommendation. As a bonus point they integrate directly with e-junkie so the amount of work I do on 95 out of 100 CD orders is… nothing. It just happens and I get a bill at the end of the month.
