Find the To Do List in the Email
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
Before I worked at Focus to Evolve, I had a job in the financial industry. The clients that we serviced at that job had our phone numbers and email addresses and had direct access to us. We frequently received emails from clients, and often those emails had multiple instructions. For example, it would be common for a client to send an email asking for a cash flow initiation, then mention they didn’t receive their statement last month, and then casually ask if they could schedule a meeting with their financial advisor. So after I read that email, I had three new things to get done: the cash flow, the statement, and schedule the meeting.
I have been surprised throughout my professional career by how often other people didn’t see or address all of the requests in the emails they received. For some colleagues, if they received the cash flow, statement, and meeting email described above; they would simply set up the cash flow and move on to the next thing.
Similarly, I would send emails to people asking for answers to three questions. Knowing that some people have a tendency to not address every part of an email, I would even explicitly say in the email that I have three questions and then numerically list them. And it wouldn’t be uncommon in this scenario to receive an email back that simply said “yes,” and none of my questions were yes/no questions! I suspect this happens because people don’t have a system in place for keeping track of all of their tasks and when a new task or conversation happens to distract them, they move onto the next thing and don’t think about that email again until the original sender follows up with them.
Not responding to all parts of an email will often cost you more time, not to mention credibility. Whenever someone would respond to my clearly delineated questions with no answers, it just meant that I would need to waste time sending the same email again, and they would have to waste time reading it again (or for the first time I suspect).
A best practice that I adhere to in order to avoid this problem is before I respond to an email, I read through the original request again and make sure that I’ve touched on every inquiry. In the case of the original email I referenced in this post, I would have let the client know when to expect their money, sent them their statement, and given date possibilities for the meeting request. If one of the requests in the email is something that you can’t do, get the person who can take care of that part involved and let the client know that you referred that question to someone else and let the client know who that person is. And if you don’t know the answer to a question, let the client know that you’re looking into it and give a slightly padded timeframe of when you expect you might have an answer. For example, if you think the answer might take a week to get, tell the client you’ll get back to them in a week and a half if it’s not something urgent. Addressing each inquiry the first time will save you time, and it will build your credibility with others.
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Productively Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team