Email Etiquette
Why It Matters?
Since we’re not present with our clients all the time, a lot of communication is done by email. One of the issues with email communication is that it’s very easy to misinterpret each other. You could take things negatively when they’re not intended. It’s extremely important that you write in a way that facilitates easy and clear interaction for people you work with.
Most of the tutors on our team have no problem with writing itself, but what we find is that a lot of people don’t think of the effect of the time delay of responses.
Email is kind of an unnatural medium - if you imagine you said something to a person and they don’t respond for 5days, it’d feel weird, right? Because of that, we suggest that tutors respond to all emails within 2 business days at most. In general, the sooner you respond the better.
Response Time
If you remember our job post you saw when you applied to work with BMT, you might remember seeing a line saying that we’re strict about email response time.
Email response time makes a big difference in how people will perceive you in professional setting- it’s one of the ways people will evaluate your professionalism because if you don’t hear back from someone it feels bad, it makes you think that you can’t rely on them, and since we’re an agency that offers service at premium rate, this is one of the ‘soft skills’, ‘soft services’, and ‘soft quality’ that we must be very strong on.
If you take a long time to respond to the BMT office, we’d assume that you feel okay to do the same with clients which might result in fewer job offers from us.
If You Don't Have an Answer Right Away
Some emails might not require an immediate response, but confusion occurs often in the type of setting when someone asks you something and you don’t have an answer right away so you need time to figure it out. A lot of people when being in this kind of situation, they don’t answer until they know their response, and this creates confusion and uncertainty.
What you should do when someone writes to you (this goes for both clients and the BMT office) is that you respond right away with whatever answer you can provide at the moment. For example:
“Thanks for asking, it’ll take me a couple of days to figure this out. I’m going to follow up with you whenever”
The worst thing you can do in email communications is that you ignore emails.
