Personal Productivity - How Clear Are You? Email Reduction Technique

How much time do you spend dealing with unnecessary email queries? Providing clear information could save you and your customers time and frustration. Here are two recent examples from my inbox of email that could have been eliminated if the original information had been clear.

Example One
Original email I received:

On Wednesday, 22 October 2008, the Space & Missile Systems Center (SMC) Small Business Office (BC) is hosting a no-cost, one-day Small Business R&D and Space Technologies Fair. The title of the event is Locating Small Business Opportunities in a Space Environment.

Attached is a copy of the event flyer. Please consider attending and adding your voice to the discussion.

The signature consisted of a name, title and "Space & Missile Systems Center". The flyer added "LA AFB" as the location.

My email response:

I appreciate your effort to get this info out to small businesses. I have one suggestion to improve the usefulness of your message: please include an address and/or link to a map both within your text and on the flyer.

I was unfamiliar with the LA AFB, and had to google for a web page, then had to navigate through 3 web pages (a "contact us" or "location" page with a link to google maps would have been helpful) before I got even a general idea of the base location. Unless you were screening for persistence, I doubt you intended to lose so many of your intended audience. Since you probably have little say in the website design, including the info in your own signature would save your new contacts significant time and frustration.

Example Two
Dream Dinners helps me get food on the table. Every month or so, my husband and I join a session to prepare dinners for the next month, which we then take home and put in the freezer. It's a great time saver. I'll let the emails explain the problem.

My original email:

Help! I pulled out a 3 serving BBQ Shrimp (from June 08) from my
freezer and realized I don't have the cooking instructions. Can you
please email me the cooking instructions?

Thank you!

P.S. Cooking instructions would be great to have on your website -
I searched and could not find.

Customer Service Response (Thankfully the same day):

We are pleased to provide you with cooking instructions for the BBQ Shrimp which were offered as part of our June 2008 menu.

Dream Dinners offers cooking instructions for current and several previous months’ meals on our website. To view this information go to http://www.dreamdinners.com/. From our home page select “Menus & Sessions” and then “Preview Current Menu”. From this page click on the “cooking instructions” link towards the top of the page. Select the month that the menu was offered using the drop down box. Cooking instructions for both 3 serving and 6 serving meals will be displayed.

We appreciate you sharing with us that you experienced difficulties locating the cooking instructions on our website. We will continue to monitor guest comments regarding this matter.

While I appreciate the fast response, do you see the problem? Somehow I am expected to understand that a previous month's cooking instructions can be found on a page titled "Preview Current Menu". This web page has no site map or search box, so the page titles are even more important. What a waste of not only my time, but also the customer service rep who had to respond!

How complete is your email signature? How could the navigation on your company's website be improved? Little changes can add up to a lot of saved time.