Monkey business at Inspire: technical primates

Inspire Website Management Sorts Tech Problems Before They Cost You

I’m sure you’ll have heard of many businesses claiming to be passionate about customer service, raising the bar, going above and beyond, helping you get the best from your website, blah blah blah.

For me though this needs to become part of who we are and demonstrated, not just once but every day.

I took the decision a few years ago to move from using our own servers SMTP relay to Mandrill’s 3^rd Party SMTP Relay.  

 We use Mandrill to help us help you.  “But surely a mandrill is a type of primate,” I hear you say.  “What has that got to do with web design and tech support?”  Well, with all due respect to the eponymous primates, this is not just any old mandrill.

The Mandrill app is an email infrastructure service.  We use it to send automated one-to-one emails, such as contact form enquiries, user registration emails, password resets, online orders, confirmation of acceptance of terms, welcome messages, the list is pretty much endless.  It also does neat things like automatically inserting the first name of a recipient into each one of a batch of emails, so it gives a personal touch to marketing emails and newsletters.

The other really useful thing about Mandrill is that, as long as we manage your website, it tells us if a message you’ve sent doesn’t get delivered.  We are advised real-time of delivery failures and we use this to identify any issues and help you sort out the problem, whether it’s a technical one or a typing error.

There’s a load of different status codes for the many things that can cause an email to bounce back, but the most common one is a typo.  If the address on an ordinary letter is slightly wrong, the Royal Mail can often work out where it should be delivered because they have local knowledge and experience.  Email delivery services don’t work like that.  So if someone enters “.con” instead of “.com”, or “bttinternet” instead of “btinternet”, the email simply can’t be delivered because there’s no such address to deliver it to. 

We understand how frustrating that can be for you, and how much lost business it could mean.  That’s why we monitor those lists every day for our web-management clients, to help them find out what went wrong and sort it out for them if it’s a technical issue.

Some people think that having their website managed will be expensive, or that they won’t be able to alter the text when they need to, but that’s not the case.  In fact, having your website and Undelivered Email codes properly monitored and managed could actually deliver a tremendous return on your investment as well as saving you money and effort. 

How does that work?  Well, when someone contacts you via your website and your own email server has blocked the email coming in who is going to tell you? This can be particularly the case if Outlook has updated its spam filters as it doesn’t like the sending server. You don’t know how much business the intended recipient could have meant to you.  Alternatively if you attempt to contact someone using an incorrect email address not all email providers will send you a Delivery Failure report and you’ll just perhaps think the person had moved on or was no longer interested.  So you’ve wasted staff time and money (even more money if you bought the mailing list).  But if we can give you a second chance to send the email, you might gain a valuable customer.

Equally, if your customer service team has sent an email to a disgruntled customer trying to sort out their problem, and the email doesn’t arrive, you’ve still got a disgruntled customer – and they’ll probably tell lots of other people about your lousy customer service.  If we can sort out the email problem for you, you may have a happy customer for life who will tell all their friends how brilliant you are.

One of our core services is Developer SOS and this tool is great for us when carrying out diagnostics on a clients environment to trace where the problem is. It can also advise if the problem is DNS related or other. We will also fix any other technical problems that may arise with your website, giving you complete peace of mind. 

Websites are so important to businesses and organisations these days: you really can’t afford to have yours crash or be downgraded by Google because they’ve changed the rules.  We’ll keep on top of all that sort of thing for you, leaving you free to get on with what you’re best at and saving you time and hassle in the process.

If you’d like to find out more about how a Mandrill (or a human) could help you with undelivered emails or website management, give us a call on 01738 700 006.