My son and I recently visited our local Captain D’s restaurant. It’s not one we go to regularly, but used to be a favorite of mine growing up and was definitely one of my Meemaw’s favorite places for us to bring her food from when we visited.
Me being the person that I am, I start reviewing the receipt while we’re waiting for our food to be ready and I notice at the bottom they provided contact information for comments. A phone number if you wanted to call and an email address of [email protected].
My first question, is why wouldn’t they use their own corporate domain, or a domain variation like www.captaindsfeedback.com to further promote their brand? My next thought was what is “902Office”? Perhaps “902? was the Store# for his particular location in Indiana. I don’t believe that’s the case because if I go search for this store location on the corporate website, the map pointer is identified with 205933. Also, maybe not the store number, but probably a good chance it is. Maybe even 902office.com was a 3rd party service that was used to manage their customer feedback program.
So What Is 902office.com
Later when I got back home I decided to go visit www.902office.com to satisfy my curiosity. You know what you get when you visit that website? This…
To me, that’s just a completely lost opportunity to strengthen your brand and your corporate communication opportunity with your customers.
If it were me overseeing the communications configuration for a retail chain like this, I would make use of the store number and the main corporate website (or another targeted and branded domain site as mentioned before) to setup email alias accounts for every one of my locations: [email protected] for example.
Now, when email is sent to this address I can setup filters at the server level to automatically copy any emails with “feedback” in the name to go to the appropriate department, while also forwarding a copy of the email to local store manager and perhaps even the regional or state managers for the company.
No real additional cost to configure the email aliases for the organization and now the appropriate parties are notified instantly and can begin addressing the situation that was shared by the customer.
How Does Your Company Do It?
How does your company handle your public facing communication channels? This same type of alias strategy could be used for location specific Facebook pages and Twitter accounts as well.
