If you’re a business, you should make it easy for your customers to get in touch with you.

Sometimes, you’ll want to send customers an email automatically: “Your order is on its way” is the canonical example. These emails may be automatic, but there’s no reason why they have be engineered to prevent people from replying to them. Doing so is a missed opportunity: if a customer has a question about their order, these emails are an chance to hook them up with whoever on your staff manages queries about orders. No support tickets, no generic email addresses, no waiting in phone queues: they can just reply to the email and get directly to the person they need.

That’s good customer service. If you’re going to send messages to people, it’s not polite — or prudent — to prevent them from sending messages back to you. Some companies have realised that a personal message is A Good Thing ™, but seem to have got lost half way, as in this rather strange example:

Thanks once again for shopping with Bingo Bob’s Superstore.

Kind regards

John Smith

Customer Service Manager

This is an automatically generated email – please do not reply to it. If you have any queries regarding your order please email impersonal_slow_generic_helpdesk@bingobob.com

At worst, if you really don’t want a real person to deal with responses, set your automatic emails up so I can press reply and send a message to your generic customer services email address.

There’s no reason not to, and it saves me time — which everyone appreciates.

Simon Dickson picks up an interesting story from the BBC’s Editors’ blog about official releases of statistics.

Usually, when the Department of Children, Schools & Families releases new statistics, they’re given to the media in advance. The media need this lead time to be able to format all their articles and tables and make sure everything is correct and works properly: this is fair enough, given that they’re the data they’re working with lives in lots of Excel spreadsheets, with multiple sections, differing layouts and everything else you really don’t want if you’re tasked with this kind of job.

Given what they have to work with, the BBC’s anger is understandable, but perhaps misplaced: why are we still dealing with bunch of spreadsheets in the information age? Why isn’t there an API that allows this data to be queried, or at the very least, a standard data format that doesn’t change from year to year, and doesn’t reply on proprietary technologies that are hard to work with?

An API or standard data format would allow media organisations to write code which generates the statistics they need every year. They wouldn’t have to create new tools to be tweaked and tested every time there are new statistics. Better still, it would create a market for someone to create a tool that did this for them, saving them money. Even better than that, it would allow anyone who wants to do something innovative with these statistics to do so far more easily.

I think I’m not alone in saying that the case for releasing data properly — in reusable formats, to everyone, for free, whenever it is possible — has been made, has been heard and has been widely accepted as valid.

Why are we still fiddling with messy spreadsheets, and bemoaning the fact that we only have days to do what should take hours?

Maps to display levels of crime, nationwide, were promised by the Government last year. It’s great to see that they’ve finally launched. This is a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, it’s only a small one. Some forces have collaborated, but most have their own maps — which seems very strange. Why not a central service? We have the National Crime Reporting Standards, so there must be some consistency in the data from individual forces. It seems rather strange to implement 40-odd websites that all do the same thing, not to mention inconvenient: people who live in areas that adjoin other police forces will have to check two or more sites to get a good idea of the levels of crime in their neighbourhood.

It also means that the quality of these sites is extremely variable: from the good, to the average, to the downright mediocre. Why didn’t the Met simply share — or even, sell — its nice Google Maps mashup to the other forces around the country? Why waste money reinventing the wheel?

We would also love to see an API, or at least some way to get these stats in a machine-readable format. We’d like to be able to take this data and play with it. We’d like graphs that compare levels of crime to population, mean income, number of CCTV cameras, number of police officers per person, proximity to alcohol retailers, or anything else that takes our fancy. Of course, not all this data is readily available, but getting hold of crime stats would be a great improvement.

Finally: there’s some speculation over whether these maps break the Ordnance Survey’s licensing terms. Said terms are extremely bad: expect programmers who work in this sector to go into histrionics if you mention them. The Home Office have said, more or less, that they’ll sort it out. Quite how, or what was decided, is unclear: Did the OS get a shedload of money, or did the government come to some arrangement? If it’s the latter, I hope it may go some way towards helping third-sector projects too.

In any case, despite all these gripes, this is a great development. Congratulations are due to all involved: hopefully, this is just the first of many such innovations to come.