Thai Business And Email

[Hurricane51]

Does anyone have an explanation for the lack of response from Thai businesses when I send an email request? I would estimate my response rate about 1 in 10. I mean, simple things, like a clarification on a hotel room, or "Do you have this item in stock?"

It eludes me.

[mosquitoman]

I know exactly what you mean, I have given up sending emails to Thai companies, I now fax them, this has a far better response rate.

I have also found that multinational companies based in Thailand are sometimes no bettter, for replying to emails or faxes

Very Frustrating

MM

Edited October 19, 2006 by mosquitoman

[Soju]

Probably because the person reading the emails doesn't know English or isn't sure enough of their English skills to respond to you. Rather than losing face in front of their boss by admitting they lack the skills, it's easier to just ignore your email and then deny they ever received it if ever confronted about it.

[rcm]

Does anyone have an explanation for the lack of response from Thai businesses when I send an email request? I would estimate my response rate about 1 in 10. I mean, simple things, like a clarification on a hotel room, or "Do you have this item in stock?"

It eludes me.

It is true that you can rarely get a response from a Thai Business.Telephone Calls or a personal visit are better in getting feedbacks. I tried the email way before .....even with large (international) Businesses but without luck --- you have to hold them on Gunpoint to send you an Email back....

rcm

[leisurely]

I wonder if it is because a lot of Thai people (in my experience) speak but don't read English. could it be a case of face loss for a badly phrased reply? A couple of times I have telephoned and asked for someone who spoke English, get put on hold for 30 seconds or so then the line disconnects. still, it could be worse.

[Casanundra]

my secretaries never read their e-mails until I go into the office and prod them with a big stick.

The problem is as stated, they don't like to read e-mails written in English and most certainly don't like to respond to them which is a bit disconcerting as 60% of the business comes in from overseas via e-mails and responses to the website.

The other factor is that Thais very much like to do things on a personal level and e-mails are too cold and too distant for their liking.

Edited October 20, 2006 by Casanundra

[meadish_sweetball]

I wonder if it is because a lot of Thai people (in my experience) speak but don't read English. could it be a case of face loss for a badly phrased reply? A couple of times I have telephoned and asked for someone who spoke English, get put on hold for 30 seconds or so then the line disconnects. still, it could be worse.

Did you actually mean that the other way around? Thai people, at least with university degrees, often understand written English much better than they speak or write it - they have all had a fair amount of exposure to English texts, but few of them have had a teacher able to teach them proper pronunciation and reasonably correct grammar.

I agree fear of not being understood could be one factor, another one is probably that it is so easy to just press the erase button without anybody else noticing there ever was an email. A fax will draw some attention from other people at the office, so it isn't as easy to ignore.

[PeaceBlondie]

Many people, not just Thais, aren't even sure if an email calls for formal business terminology, or informal. It's new, and wasn't covered in school.

My partner, from a working class background, doesn't even use the telephone for business use, such as to call the Honda dealer to see if the bike is ready to be picked up, or what the business hours are, or whether a certain part is in stock, even for a Thai-to-Thai conversation in local dialect.

Could these problems relate to social class - that they don't like to deal with anybody whose class status is uncertain? Or do the problems relate to inner-outer circle, where they only deal with people they know,within their circle of friends and coworkers? Or is it the good old mai-bpen-rai attitude, that I can ignore any problem and it'll go away?

[markuk]

in my opinion they are just lazy buggers!!

just another frustration of doing business in this country

[jingjoe]

Use a little CDF here, keeping your emails short and simple will maximise you chances of a useful response.

[steveromagnino]

Ironically I find the single worst culprits are any non Thais living here in Thailand.

Or multinationals. Those two categories suck the most.

[Hurricane51]

Use a little CDF here, keeping your emails short and simple will maximise you chances of a useful response.

[PeaceBlondie]

My choice of TEFL school in Thailand was heavily influenced by the e-mail response I got from two (non-Thai operated) competitors. The Brits who 'couldn't be arsed' to reply to my e-mail didn't get my money; the Brit working for an American was extremely helpful, and got my money.

[chuchok]

When calling a Thai company and asking them why they had not replied to my e-mail, they said "Sorry,e-mail full"

[Nam Kao]

Bargirls always write back

[ZZZ]

I must have been lucky then, 100% success rate with about 30 different companies. Some have even replied that they could not answer at the moment but will get back ASAP and have actually done that!!

[Heng]

There are also a lot of time wasters (competitors fishing for price lists, folks who just want to mine information so they can perhaps set themselves up as competitors themselves, kids straight out of school/and sometimes old folks retiring with hopes of doing something part-time looking for non-paid internships, etc.) out there as well, these folks don't always deserve a reply IMO. Yeah, it's annoying to be deleted as a time waster, good folks who aren't are collateral damage. True, there could be an auto-responder type email set up with a politely worded 'public relations' response, but given the email volume of a lot of businesses, this can add quite a bit to the workload and overhead cost as well. Junk mail costs money.

Also, with an awful lot of companies pushing their sales folks and account execs to keep their net sales up (and these people themselves wanting to keep their commissions fat), it's hard to keep them from zeroing in and 'fighting over' order emails instead of general inquiry emails.

[qualtrough]

I was going to start a similar topic. In the last several weeks I wrote e-mail messages to four or five different Thai companies with professional Web sites (English Language enabled sites) inquiring about their products. Left my name, address, etc. so I wasn't some anonymous time-waster. Didn't receive any response back. Not sure why they bother with the Web sites.

Similarly, for the last nine years I have regularly been placing orders with a small family-run company. I have tried faxing orders and RFQs to them using their fax machine, but they never respond so I end up going down there all the time. Part of the problem is that they use their fax ribbons over so that incoming faxes are difficult to read. I don't know why they don't just unplug the thing. Oh, I know why. They use it to fax out. I would go somewhere else but they have the best prices by far. Probably because they don't waste money on things like fax ribbons

[PeaceBlondie]

My landlady is incalculably rich (and Thai). Fax, she understands. Mobile phone, she understands. But e-mail, mai kojai. She's bilinugally fluent and well educated, but the internet is just a bridge too far away for her.

[Ulysses G.]

There are also a lot of time wasters (competitors fishing for price lists, folks who just want to mine information so they can perhaps set themselves up as competitors themselves, kids straight out of school/and sometimes old folks retiring with hopes of doing something part-time looking for non-paid internships, etc.) out there as well, these folks don't always deserve a reply IMO.

The e-mails that I get from my website are a complete waste of time. Folks asking for things that are mostly impossible to find in Thailand at prices way below what they are worth, but it looks professional to offer "customers" the opportunity to ask. Something that I do enjoy is the supposedly insulting letters from jealous competitors.

It really gives me a charge to know that their lives are so miserable and their businesses so slow that they have to resort to sneaking off to the e-mail cafe and sending anonymous e-mails to their betters. I just laugh, gloat and delete them and their sad, pathetic little selves from my universe until next time.

[mrbojangles]

Also with e-mails, there are now so many Spam filters etc. you don't know if it has been received or if youv'e gone into the Junk folder

[james512]

Just saw this thread and thought i'd throw my tuppence in. I don't do business in Thailand but i have emailed quite a few distributors of Hi Fi equipment in Bangkok and have had replies to all my enquiries.

Is it just sales people who reply or have i just been lucky?

[Hurricane51]

Just saw this thread and thought i'd throw my tuppence in. I don't do business in Thailand but i have emailed quite a few distributors of Hi Fi equipment in Bangkok and have had replies to all my enquiries.

Is it just sales people who reply or have i just been lucky?

Well, most recently (and the results that prompted this thread) I sent:

1. A hotel in Pattaya asking what size was a "single bed" and also was a non-smoking room available.

2. A computer shop that's advertised a brand of monitor if they had a particular model or if they could order it for me. It was a top-of-the-line model -- it's not like I was bargain basement shopping.

3. A computer shop selling a particular brand of computer when they expected to receive that manufacturer's latest model. Again -- the latest model is also the priciest so I would expect a potential pre-sale would get their attention.

All simple requests -- none replied. I followed up in each case -- in the hotel's case twice.

I think I'm going to take mosquitoman's and try faxing and see if my results improve.

[Douggie Style]

well Hurricane51 in my experience that is the kind of email that won't get answered because it is more detail orientated than sales orientated.

Of course sales are made from simple queries but again in my experience the Thai's may be inclined to immediately classify you as a time waster and just ignore it.

This perception probably develops from experience>>example in a typical day we get a hel_l of a lot of email queries (over 100 per each staff), from all over the world, a lot of it is junk or leads to a never ending series of further questions (some cultures are quite notorius for the bulk enquiry email) and the sale goes elsewhere...plus the phone is running constantly, via the headphones. so as a practical matter the emails that are likely to be a 'hot' lead ( eg a follow up to a call) will get answered first.

Now this is possibly not the way a lot of farangs do business and it is probably worthwhile to answer the email to build a relationship but as you implied you are a farang dealling with a Thai business so the prevailing business dynamic takes it's own course. Obviously if farangs made up the bulk of their buisiness they would have to adapt or fail.

Our staff all have at least bachelors (most have Masters taken in English) and read/answer emails fluently in either english or Thai.

As an experiment try asking about price first (or something to imply you are a buyer) then add a detail question in last, see how you go....

Edited October 21, 2006 by Douggie Style

[Hurricane51]

well Hurricane51 in my experience that is the kind of email that won't get answered because it is more detail orientated than sales orientated.

Of course sales are made from simple queries but again in my experience the Thai's may be inclined to immediately classify you as a time waster and just ignore it.

This perception probably develops from experience>>example in a typical day we get a hel_l of a lot of email queries (over 100 per each staff), from all over the world, a lot of it is junk or leads to a never ending series of further questions (some cultures are quite notorius for the bulk enquiry email) and the sale goes elsewhere...plus the phone is running constantly, via the headphones. so as a practical matter the emails that are likely to be a 'hot' lead ( eg a follow up to a call) will get answered first.

Now this is possibly not the way a lot of farangs do business and it is probably worthwhile to answer the email to build a relationship but as you implied you are a farang dealling with a Thai business so the prevailing business dynamic takes it's own course. Obviously if farangs made up the bulk of their buisiness they would have to adapt or fail.

Our staff all have at least bachelors (most have Masters taken in English) and read/answer emails fluently in either english or Thai.

As an experiment try asking about price first (or something to imply you are a buyer) then add a detail question in last, see how you go....

Ha ha! I would've thought that asking for a price first would be ignored as I was only interested in low price. I've certainly got that backward. It's certain that my way of doing things is not getting the response I've expected. And they have no way of knowing how I make a buying decision.

I'm going to try a different tack with the hotel to see if I can approach it differently.

My guess is that businesses that solicit business via the web possibly don't realize that much of the sales pitch has been made at that point of contact and that what might remain are only detail questions. It's different from personal or even phone contacts. But I see your point of being overrun with emails with diminished hopes of having them lead anywhere.

Oh, by the way I tried calling the hotel about 5 times over the course of the day and the line was always busy.

[Douggie Style]

'Oh, by the way I tried calling the hotel about 5 times over the course of the day and the line was always busy.'

Well after recovering from the floor (not used to getting a decent reply!), it just isn't your day is it?

PS: if you do discover the holy grail of getting a Thai email (or any) to reply please let us know!

Edited October 22, 2006 by Douggie Style

[IMA_FARANG]

in my opinion they are just lazy buggers!!

just another frustration of doing business in this country

Back in the 80's the the BBC Business news did a survey of the responses from the following:

1. British companies

2. European companies (EU)

3. American companies

4. Japanese companies>

In each case they made a request tailored to the particular business of the company requesting information on products available and prices. The results were:

1. British companies - 4 out of 10 firms replied (the survey was done in the U.K.)

2. European (EU) companies - 2 out of 10 replied

3. American companies - no replies (not a single one)

4. Japanese companies - 9 out of 10 replied. 6 companies also telephoned. 5 of the companies not only telephoned but ofered to send a company rep to discuss possible busines.

Of course things may have changed since the 80's, but I doubt they have changed that much.