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Some tips to improve the ratio between received and not received feedbacks Fabrizio Pirovano
Marco Monti
To reply or not to reply? That is the QUESTION!
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o you ever get the feeling that your emails fall on deaf ears? It also happens to you to write to someone and get no reply? If you too are victims of non-responses and experience the prejudicial anxiety of having done something wrong, or that the digital interlocutor is an arrogant and self-referential person - that is, a boor - then we will explain what you can do. During a course on digital communication, a client asked us: “When I send an email, can I know if the recipient is reading it?”. We were sorry to give him a negative answer. In fact some mail systems offer the possibility to ask for the receipt, but leave the recipient the courtesy to confirm. This is also the case on WhatsApp - you will think - but, obviously, WhatsApp makes us less fussy privacy defenders. All this, of course, does not apply to Certified Electronic Mail, which has the purpose of having valid confirmation of receipt. Remember, however, that receiving the email does not mean reading its content. 36
| October/2021
We are aware that it may seem absurd: “If you receive an email, it also means that you will read it ...”. But it’s not always like this. We had, some time ago, a weird conversation with a public office, to which we had sent a document. Not having obtained what we expected, we asked for information on the document we had sent and they did so replied: “Yes, certainly we have received it but we have not registered it. So you send it back to us”. Obviously we were thrilled. Is there a remedy? Maybe yes or maybe no, it depends. Let’s say that there are, however, tricks to encourage the good habits of others.
MAKE MORE ASSUMPTIONS
If they don’t answer you, they are rude, or: ■ they may not have received the email; ■ you may not have received the response they sent you; ■ you may have deleted their answer by mistake; ■ may find their answer in the spam folder. Can you exclude, with absolute certainty, that the absence of a reply cannot fall into one of the options just indicated? Certainly it could already be that the receiver of your email is a rude person, but what about the other hypotheses? Before plotting your revenge, consider that in all these hypotheses the responsibility is not of the receiver, but it is yours. Warning to those who do not respond by choice: if you, who are reading, belong to that population that does not acknowledge receipt and does not give any sign when receiving an email, because it thinks it makes a serious and very busy person to postpone the
