The fellow who posted the topic had a client that did not know his email was delayed by 3 hours. The client was claiming that this cost him $16,000. Wow! He was pissed (I would be too).
My first question was, why did the guy rely on email for this communication? What made him think that it was a "guaranteed" communication method? There are an unlimited number of factors that could have interrupted that communication. Here are a few that come straight to my mind:
- Spam filters - as everyone knows, these are a necessity for the current email system. You probably have also had to deal with a false positive (when a legit message is caught in the filter)
- Internet - it's not perfect... sometimes routes are delayed or down completely
- Power was off at the recipient
- The recipient just didn't read it - this one is big for me! What's to say the sender's message was ever going to be read?
If I was sending a message that I knew was worth a lot of money and was also time sensitive I would take steps to ensure that the recipient saw my message. Some folks use read receipts. These can work but some people ignore them or their mail client doesn't support them (I am actually annoyed by them b/c many people over use them).
Another method is to add some type of enticement that causes a reply message. Ask a simple yes/no question. You can also take this as far as spelling it out: "Please respond to let me know that you have received this message". I have some accounting clients that have to do this!
Call the recipient! If you haven't heard back, then call them to touch base and see if they received the message.
Above all, remember that when you hit send your communication is not guaranteed to arrive!
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