EMAIL POLICY

Sending emails to individual staff members in the Advice Centre is not a good idea: if the Adviser is out, no-one will pick up your email. If the Adviser is away for weeks, this would leave you waiting a very long time for a reply.

So, we ask customers to email us using one of the following addresses:

For Advice:

sac@staffs.ac.uk (an older version: sais@staffs.ac.uk also still works)

For “Money Doctors” issues:

moneydoctors@staffs.ac.uk

Email is usually not a great way to get advice: it’s easy to misunderstand text and often we need to ask chains of questions to get to the heart of an issue. It’s good for short pinpoint questions, not so good for big interpretive ones. If you can speak with us, it’s worth talking rather than emailing.

Because it takes more time to answer emails than to deal with the same question in person, the Advice email service is restricted to people who can’t access us any other way.

Our Advice email service standards – a summary:

1. We aim to acknowledge receipt of emails from clients within one working day of receiving it (weekends don’t count as “working days”).
2. We aim to give a substantive response to all our clients’ emails within five working days. If a query only needs a short answer, or we need to ask for more information before giving you a full answer, we try to reply within two working days but can’t guarantee this service level.
3. Just like our other services, we do not offer a choice of Adviser: emails are allocated to all the Advisers based on a mixture of “rota” and availability.
4. If a client emails any Adviser’s individual address, s/he will forward the email to sac@staffs.ac.uk for a response to be given.