The meaning of ordering a copy of the letter. Creating a feedback form using standard Joomla tools

Alison Garrido is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) accredited by the International Coach Federation, facilitator and speaker. Helping clients find jobs and career advancement based on their strengths. Advises on career development, preparation for interviews, negotiations for wages and evaluation of results, as well as individual communication and leadership strategies. He is a founding partner of the New Zealand Academy of Systems Coaching.

Number of sources used in this article: . You will find a list of them at the bottom of the page.

E-mail communication, like other areas, has its own rules of etiquette and social protocol. If you need to write a letter asking for feedback at work or school, or to receive feedback on your written work, you should think about the wording, the structure of the letter, and also choose the right moment. This will allow you to make the letter as effective as possible. Be polite, punctual and to the point to get the information you need.

Steps

How to ask customers for feedback

Don't ask too many questions. Clients receive great amount requests to take a survey from various companies. If you want the client to delete your email upon receipt, include a huge number of questions in it. If you want to interest a person, limit yourself to a couple of questions.

Ask questions that require a detailed answer. Don't ask questions that can be answered with "yes" or "no". Instead of "Would you recommend us to your friends?" ask the following question: "How would you describe us to another person?" These questions will help you get more information.

Promise the customer to respond as soon as possible. Thanks to this, the client will feel that his opinion can affect something. If a person knows that they will answer him, he will write a more sincere review.

When responding to a review, be honest and act like a professional. IN modern world because of the possibilities of the Internet, you can instantly lose your reputation if you behave unprofessionally with people.

Do not use flash-graphics and other objects that will take a long time to load. If a person has a slow connection, he will probably delete the message if he realizes that it is taking too long to load. Remember: you need feedback, not the client.

Choose the right font and format. The letter should look neat and professional. An email in Comic Sans with poor quality graphics is unlikely to impress your customers. It is better to use standard fonts ( Times New Roman, Arial) if you are not familiar with fonts, and refuse a large number charts.

Make sure your email reads well on all devices. Single-column text will be more convenient than multi-column text. The font should not be too small. The letter should be readable on a laptop, phone and tablet. Since in today's world many people read mail from their phone, the letter must conform to this format.

The letter will be modest. Follow the rules of correspondence accepted at your place of work. Humility will help you get feedback, but don't go overboard or your boss might think you don't know anything about your work. Formulate questions in such a way that everyone can see your progress in any project or task. This will let your supervisor know that you are not messing around. Below are some more important recommendations.
- You can say this: "I was working on a presentation that is needed tomorrow, and I had a question about the format. I am not sure that I correctly understand the standards adopted in our company. I am attaching the presentation to this letter and I will be very grateful if you take a look and comment if everything is ok. Thank you for your help."
- Don't forget to thank the person.
Talk about specific things. This will avoid common phrases that will be useless. Don't ask questions that can be answered with "yes" or "no" unless absolutely necessary. Try not to ask a manager or colleague too many questions at once.

Thank the person when they answer. If you are advised to work harder or are told that your work is still not up to the mark, explain what you plan to do to fix it. Don't answer right away - give yourself a chance to calm down and process the information.
- Please respond within 1-2 days at the latest.

How to ask for a review at work

Introduce yourself. A teacher can have hundreds of students, especially if it's a university. You should indicate your first and last name, group number and faculty. If you are in high school and attend preparatory courses, enter the class. This way, the teacher won't have to guess who you are, and it will be easier for him to write a review.

Do not go beyond business communication. Sometimes it is difficult for students to write to teachers because they cannot decide on the style. If your teacher has already written to you himself, stick to the same style as him. It is better to formulate your thoughts like this: "I'm not sure that I understood the task correctly. I have a few questions about the work."

Write briefly. Don't try to explain the full context of your questions, unless the context is necessary to understand the questions. For example, if you want to ask for an extension of the deadline for work, the teacher may need detailed explanations, but if you just want to ask a question about work, do not tell why you did not have time to write earlier because of your dog and why you are writing now (if only the deadline is not coming very soon). Don't talk about things that don't really matter now.

Don't put off asking for feedback until the last minute. Your teacher is unlikely to want to help you on the eve of the test and will probably be unhappy that you did not bother to apply earlier. If you feel compelled to ask questions at the last minute, keep it short, to the point, and apologize for bothering you. Thanks to this, the likelihood that the teacher will answer you will be higher (but on the condition that he reads the letter on time).

Use the format specified by the instructor. Often, teachers stipulate a specific format in which the assignment should be completed. For example, if your instructor asked you to send your work in .doc format, don't send it in .pdf or .pages. If you don't know which format to use, use .rtf or .pdf, or ask your teacher a question.

Ask for feedback on work you've already turned in or on your performance on an exam. Write a polite letter to the teacher. If the teacher has visiting hours, go to him personally. Say something like, "I didn't do as well as I thought I did on the exam. Could you please point out my mistakes so that I can better prepare for the next exam?" As a rule, teachers are willing to give recommendations in such cases.

How to ask for feedback on a written work

First write to someone you know personally. If you want detailed feedback, you should contact someone you know well (for example, a friend or colleague). Write the way you normally would. If you normally call a person, do so. Don't send your work in the first email unless you're sure the person will agree to help you (for example, if you haven't asked the person to read the work yet, or if the person hasn't offered to do so).

You can include a short excerpt or description in your letter. It depends on whether you are writing to a friend or a colleague.

Write to a specialist in the field. If you need a professional opinion, write a letter to a professional you know and explain what your project is and why you need feedback. Do not put pressure on the person - just politely ask him to think. Say something like: "I understand if you don't have time for this." It may be worth asking the person if they can recommend another expert for you.

Don't send your work in the first email. Most likely, such a letter will remain unanswered, unless you indicate that this work will be paid. If you contact a famous person, he is unlikely to answer you, because he receives a bunch of similar letters. It is better to ask friends, colleagues, teachers first. Surely they will be ready to help you and go forward.

Explain what kind of feedback you need. If you want to hear only positive things, say so. Explain to the person if you need detailed analysis and how general the phrases should be. Indicate whether the person needs to be assessed on the style, grammar, and structure of the work. This will allow the reader to understand what you need.

Even competitors are not as dangerous as the inability to competently conduct business correspondence. Here are seven easy and likely ways to hurt yourself and your company.

For some reason, most managers assume by default that the workers definitely know how to correspond with each other and there is absolutely no need to teach them this craft. They are willing to spend money to train staff to communicate with customers on the phone and in meetings. Less often, managers are taught written communication with customers - writing commercial offers and selling texts. And very rarely they are ready to teach communications in principle, and in particular written ones. And they do not understand that in this way they literally deprive themselves of money. After all, lucrative contracts may not be concluded, and signed agreements may not be fulfilled simply because the communication process is interrupted or distorted at some stage. And the reasons why this problem occurs, most often are as follows.

1. No subject line

One day you will have to look for a long, long ago sent letter, to which was attached important document or in which the information needed right now was sent. Or maybe you have to restore the entire history of correspondence on a project. Then you will remember with a kind word great topic letters.

What can happen?

Light version: you will just kill a lot of working time looking for a couple of lines.
Hard version: you will never find the same letter where your boss promised you a promotion at the end of the project.

2. Rambling

In ethics business correspondence there is the concept of Rambling or "incoherent presentation of thoughts." If you cannot state the topic or task in a few sentences, it is better to discuss it in person - by phone or at a meeting.

As a rule, task managers are used to set tasks, but they do not always cope. There are urgent assignments, there are remote workers, there is an unreasonable love of communication by mail that manifests itself in every office. Therefore, it is important to know that a beautiful task in a letter looks like this:

Summary
Clarifications, details
Questions

In order to avoid unfoundedness, we present good example: "Arkady, hello. By Wednesday, it is necessary to prepare for shipment an intermediate version of the Korovushkino milk packaging design (the one that was approved at the last meeting). The client wants to use it in a presentation for partners, so you can just make a few pictures in JPG. In addition, explain what remains to be done and when the final result will be ready. Will you prepare? Need to check with the client the size of the files? Thank you!".

For contrast, a bad example: “Arkady, make a package of milk by Wednesday. The client asked.

This is not funny: look at the mail and see how many tasks are set so that you do not need to turn on the third eye. Managers often rely on the magical intuition of colleagues and often get it wrong. Sometimes there are so many tasks that the third eye twitches back and forth in horror, and it misunderstands everything.

By the way, for those who are trying to deal with endless incoherent letters, there are TL (too long) or DR (didn’t read) marks. Send the letter back, adding a couple of letters to it.

What can happen?

Light version: you will be asked again. It will take time to answer.
Hard version: the task will be performed incorrectly, you will have to answer to the customer and, possibly, lose the project.

3. Dangerous hidden copy

The hidden copy in the letter is fertilizer for "palace intrigues". Heads of departments or companies are often placed in this field to secretly keep them up to date with work correspondence. But why do it secretly if there is a regular "Copy" field with exactly the same functionality, but with open recipients? Simply put, why did the director decide to spy? An unfortunate turn of events. Of course, in 90% of cases, no one will know about the secret addressee. But one day, a tired director will accidentally press "Reply" or "Reply all". And then a couple of awkward moments await everyone.

What can happen?

Most likely, employees will be offended and will resort to letters less often. Someone will discuss it at lunch or at a smoke break. The director and the author of the first letter will be remembered with unflattering words. No one wants to be in the role of simpletons. All these are trifles, but they will definitely affect the work and its quality.

4. Thoughtless forwarding

Thoughtlessly forwarding customer comments is a continuation of the rambling theme. Do you hope the recipient understands? Hardly. If someone sent a letter first to your mail, then you definitely understand the issue better (except when the letter got to you by mistake). Reread the letter and condense it down to a few sentences that clearly describe the task.

What can happen?

In the best case, extra work will be done. In the worst case, confidential information that was intended for you may be lost among the comments and edits. And there is no guarantee that this information will not become the property of the entire company at the next smoke break.

5. Deleted history

Correspondence history is a baggage of letters that drags almost every work letter with it. It is needed so as not to lose the thread of the conversation. Sometimes it seems that the baggage needs to be removed: without it, the letter looks neat and simple. But it's best not to touch it.

What can happen?

When you lose the thread of the conversation, there is silence or attempts to remember the content of the previous conversation begin. If useful thoughts have been voiced before, they are likely to be forgotten. In correspondence, the same is true: many simply will not respond to a letter in which we are talking about mysterious things. In the worst case, several will be lost interesting ideas that arose during the correspondence.

There are experts in the world who include the request "Please do not delete the history of correspondence" in an automatic signature. That's how important it is to them.

6. The black hole of group texting

The "Copy" field and the "Reply to all" button are weapons of mass destruction, this is a garbage truck overturned in the main square of the city. Think twice before using this. For most people, work email does not become a dump only by a miracle: they make an effort to organize it and make it a useful tool.

What can happen?

Important emails get lost, the thread of a conversation gets tangled, someone reads something they shouldn't have read, someone takes ten times as long to find a letter buried under a mass mailing pile.

7. No response

Sometimes a letter can be lost or forgotten about. Sometimes it seems that the message does not require a response, because it clearly states the task, and you understand it the first time. But work emails always require a response, because feedback is the holy of holies in a company with more than two people. Feedback moves work forward. Even simple phrases “Thank you, I received it” or “I took it to work” serve good.

What can happen?

Work will stall, the project will freeze. Having received the go-ahead, the manager can move on to the next task. Without receiving a go-ahead, he can transfer the task to another performer, and then it will be performed twice. It is ideal to respond to work emails within an hour of receiving them. Then everything will fall on the run-in rails.

The consequences of almost all mistakes are a waste of time. Within the framework of one letter, these are trifles, but within the framework of a company where hundreds of people work, these are already hours and working days. If all these “hundreds” are a little more thoughtful in their letters, then out of thin air there will be a lot of time that can be applied to solving problems and producing millions. This is one of the most obvious answers to the question "where does the time go" these days. And corporate time is always money. Think about this and how to teach your employees how to properly handle the mail and correctly put their thoughts on paper. Schools and universities, alas, do not teach this.

Timur Aslanov

Career and Self-development

Keywords:

1 -1

One of the most requested elements of the site was and remains the feedback form. It is a convenient way to establish contact between visitors and the site owner. Many webmasters install third-party extensions for organizing a feedback form, but few people know that it can be created using standard Joomla tools. This is much more correct, since each third-party extension requires a separate update and vulnerability tracking. In this article, I'll show you how to create a spam-proof contact form using standard Joomla tools.

Sometimes it happens that you have been familiar with Joomla for a long time and seem to know this CMS quite well, but one fine day you discover new opportunity, which has been in Joomla all this time, but you didn’t even know about it. The same happens with the feedback form - it is there, but it is quite difficult to find it.

In addition to the standard feedback form, I advise you to try my Wedal Joomla Callback module. It is free and allows you to upload and submit a contact form without reloading the page.

Creating a feedback form using Joomla. Component "Contacts".

Tell me honestly, how many times have you tried to figure out the standard Joomla components that are available immediately after installing it? I don’t know why, but the associations are such that they are the simplest, basic things that are unlikely to ever be needed. In fact, the opposite happens.

Joomla has a standard component called "Contacts". It's easy to understand that it allows you to show on the site a list of contacts of site owners, managers, etc. You will say: “Well, why deal with the whole component, if you can just create an article with the necessary contact information in it?”. In many ways you will be right. But, unfortunately, by doing just that, you will never know that the "Contacts" component allows you to create a separate feedback form for each contact person. Already more interesting?

On the site site you can see an example of such a form:

As you can see, everything you need for communication is available. Visitors use this form quite often. How to create it?

Component "Contacts". Adding a contact.

Go to "Components" -> "Contacts" and add a new contact.

The following form will appear:

Here you specify the name of the contact, and select the user to be associated with the contact. Usually this is the administrator.

In field " Additional Information» you can specify some text that you want to show on the contact page.

In the "Contact Details" tab, do not fill in anything.

In the "Display Settings" tab, hide everything superfluous:

In the "Feedback form" tab, we show the form:

We save.

Component "Contacts". Adding a contact menu item.

After the contact is created, you need to show it on the site. To do this, create the item “Contacts” or “Feedback” in the menu and select the type “Contacts” –> “Contact” for it:

After that, in the form that appears on the right, select the contact we created:

And we save.

That's all. You can look at our form on the site.

Important! Be sure to check the functionality of the received feedback form. Sometimes, due to wrong settings sending letters, mail is not sent. This is not a contact form error, but a settings errorJoomla mail management (see general settingsJoomla).

Creating a feedback form using Joomla. Spam protection.

It happens that spam bots roaming the Internet find your form and, since the fields in it are standard, start sending spam to the site owners. The first time, when the form is just created, I advise you not to protect it from spam. Protection should only be used when you're really tormented by advertising, since spam protection complicates the form and reduces the loyalty of the real people who use it.

How to protect the feedback form from spam? Joomla 2.5 has support for probably the best captcha (code from the picture) reCAPTCHA. The activation algorithm is as follows:

1) Getting the keys. To get activation keys, you need to go to the page http://www.google.com/recaptcha/whyrecaptcha and click the "Sign Up Now" button. You will be prompted to log in with your Google account (the reCaptcha service is owned by Google). If not, then you will need to register. After authorization, you will be asked to enter the website address:

And after that, two keys will be generated.

The entire procedure for obtaining keys and using them is free.

2) Go to the site's plugin manager and find the "CAPTCHA - reCAPTCHA" plugin there.

In its settings we see fields for entering keys:

We enter the keys, activate the plugin and save it.

3) Go to the contacts component and open the settings:

In the "Enable CAPTCHA" option, select "CAPTCHA - reCAPTCHA". We save. Ready. Now the captcha will appear in our feedback form.

By the way, reCAPTCHA can be used not only in the feedback form, but also when registering users (activated in the user manager settings).

That's all. In just 5 minutes, you can create a simple and user-friendly contact form for your Joomla site without resorting to third-party extensions.

In contact with

magician_roman in The concept of "hidden copy", learning not to do stupid things

Surprisingly, many people, when they are asked to send a letter to several people at once, simply list the addresses in the "To" field, this is normal when this letter is addressed to your colleagues or friends, but when sending letters to a group of clients, you thus show everyone addresses and other recipients, actually revealing your address base.

It is enough for any of the clients to forward this letter to your competitor and your contacts will be immediately leaked.

It's strange, but many far from stupid people are surprised to learn that if you need to send a letter to many recipients so that they do not know about each other, then there is a "Bcc" field for this.

For example, for mail.ru it will look like this:

And once again briefly:indicated addresses in "to" - everyone can see to whom you sent letters, indicated in "blind copy" - everyone thinks that the letter is only for him.

And each recipient will receive a letter where in the "to" field will be only his address . For other programs, if you can't find where to put the Bcc, then ask someone to show you. Another small point, be sure to specify one address in the "to" field, most programs or mail servers will not let you send a letter without this parameter.

And so, when it comes to sending out offers, news to a group of your customers - here the practice of using a blind copy is unambiguous, you must hide your address base. An interesting point with sending a letter to your colleagues, here it is recommended to act according to the situation, for example, sending a letter with a request to send suggestions (for example, to improve customer service) and if each colleague sees that other people have received the same letter, then most likely they will not answer - rely on others, so you need to use a hidden copy. If this order is fulfilled, then, for example, an indication of the "who" of your colleague's boss will simply work wonders, and your order will be fulfilled.

A separate issue with suppliers. On the one hand, the indication of all recipients in the copy should show the supplier that you have a choice and he should offer you good prices. On the other hand, the manager who received your letter, seeing that it was sent not only to him, will most likely treat your request as "cool". Personally, in my opinion, I think that in the case of suppliers, you need to use a blind copy, at least to protect trade secrets, but more likely to good relations with the supplier manager.

You can read a recent case of a specialist's mistake, when all recipients saw other recipients: Smack everyone in this chat, there were really respectable people there - directors, but still many received spam in response.

Well, as always, discussion in the comments is welcome.

Most email clients, including gmail, Mail.ru, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, allow you to put multiple recipients in copy(on English language abbreviation adopted SS), or Bcc (CCB). IN Copies recipients can see other people's addresses. In the second case, the identity of additional recipients is hidden.

Adding a recipient address

To specify the recipient(s) of the email, enter their email address in the field To whom (That):

Some email clients allow you to simply enter a username in a field that is then automatically populated by the program.

If you use this field to send email to multiple people, each of them will be able to see the full list of other recipients.

How to copy an email

Field CC or Copy used to exchange electronic messages in a more indirect way than the field To whom. If you are in your email are not talking directly to a person, but would like that person to follow the discussion in the email thread or just be aware of this topic, the field Copy would be a great option. Addressee located in Copies letters, receives an unread letter in his mailbox, just like the one who was placed in the box To whom; the difference is only in who you address the letter first in the body of your e-mail. In the professional world, mailing to Copies is used very widely and serves to keep colleagues informed about different events and topics.

You can list email recipients by simply entering a list of addresses in the field Copy, which is usually located immediately below the field To whom. Everyone in this chain of recipients will be able to see the names and email addresses of all other recipients:

How to Bcc an Email

Each email client (Gmail, Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Yahoo, etc.) allows the sender of an email to contact a large number people without exposing their details to other users in the email chain. This function is called BCC or Hidden copy. You can hide recipients by entering their addresses in the field Hidden copy instead of using fields To whom And Copy:

You can use this feature for both individual and group emails. This is especially useful if you want to keep your contacts private, protect them from spam and spam, or simply don't want your recipients to know who received the same message.

Field Hidden copy not always available by default for all email clients. For example, in Outlook You will need to go to Options to access the setting; V Thunderbird you will need to select this function from the drop-down menu; V gmail you have to press the button Copy And Hidden copy; V Windows Live Mail You will need to simultaneously press the keys alt + B.