One client wrote to company X to find out why it was taking them so long to apply a credit they owed to her credit card. The customer service agent for company X sent this reply:

Dear Madam:

We received your inquiry. Your refund will be credited to your account within 7 to 10 business days. If you had read our policy statement, you would know this. I hope this fully answers your question.

Regards, Company X

Whoa! Snarky.

These days, a large volume of customer service communication is done by e-mail because it's so cheap and (potentially) fast. But one of drawbacks is that it's so easy to leave wrong impression, to say things in cyber space that you would never say over phone or face to face.

Here are a few tips you can use to improve your online customer relations.

· Be professional and polite, even in face of abusive language, outright lies or stupidity. This is not as easy as it sounds. But you can't win argument AND keep customer.

· Express concern and regret over difficulty customer is having, even if your company is not to blame.

How many email messages were waiting for you when you logged on today? I'll hazard a guess and suggest that it would have been somewhat more than one!

A report from Jupiter organisation estimates that commercial e-mail spending will grow from $164 million in 1999 to $7.3 billion in 2005 - this represents an estimated forty-fold increase in e-mail volume.

It's also estimated that average number of commercial e-mail messages that US online consumers receive per year will increase from 40 in 1999 to over 1,600 in 2005; non-marketing and personal correspondence will more than double from approximately 1,750 in 1999 to almost 4,000 in 2005.

So it's no exaggeration to say that one of fastest growing methods of communication is email. In fact, we're in middle of a communications revolution and it's ironic that we're once again relying on one of earliest forms of mass communication - written word.

Language is a dynamic, living thing and in past, has been able to keep pace with changes; so, when electricity was invented (or discovered - depending on your view of world), it was given a name which comes from elektron Greek word for "amber" and electrum, Latin word for "amber" - alloy of gold and silver. In mid 1600s it was known that rubbing amber or glass would produce a magnetic effect that attracted light weight materials, threads, dust etc and this was only known use for electricity for many years - until that fellow with kite came along!

The first big break-through in rapid mass communication, telegraph, takes its name from two Greek words: tele meaning "far off" and graphein "to write, draw or represent by lines".

Television is a mix of Greek tele and Latin visus, past participle of verb "to see".

Computers were given a name which is derived from Latin computatio - a reckoning, because in early days, that's all they did.