3D Rant: If I work for you, answer my e-mail
Posted by 3Dsound at Monday, July 14, 2008 9:23 AM and is filed under uncategorized 
3rd in a series, I guess (first one published)
Draggin' the line
I don't blog about my company – But what it does is provide a service to national clients.
One consequence of my business model is that I haven't met any of my clients face-to-face. Phone conversations and e-mail promote the personal and business relationships that make working together possible.
Except, one client hasn't caught onto this, despite having engaged my service for nearly two years (which does say something positive about our relationship, since the industry standard is for engagements to last only a few months)... Whatever. Maybe three-quarters of my e-mails to the client go unanswered.
This is what I want to say to the client:
"I wouldn't contact you, if I didn't need something from you, in order for me to do my job for you. If I send you an e-mail, I need and expect a response. You and I don't have a personal relationship, which seems to be your choice, so any e-mail I send to you is always about business: Your business and how I can do more of it. I mean, Christ, Do You Understand?"
This morning (Monday morning) I'm waiting for a reply to an e-mail I sent last Thursday. That e-mail included an action step for the client to acknowledge. Basically, I need the client to either OK or reject my completion of a task. I haven't heard back from the client (of course) and – because the client's lack of response always confuses me and I don't know how to handle it – I'll forward the original e-mail to the client again (as I always do), with a request asking how to proceed.
Now, should I take a self-effacing, wimpy approach to requesting a response, such as:
"Know you're really busy. Just let me know one way or the other."
Or maybe an aggressive approach:
"Tell me this morning if you'll accept this."
Or maybe some self-gratifying snark:
"Has it really been five days since I sent you this?"
Or plain bitchiness:
"What about answering this, OK?"
Based on what I know of the client, none of those approaches strikes me as likely to elicit the response I need. Here's what I'm going to send, after I finish publishing this blog article:
"What do you want me to do about this?"
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