In order for a customer to log onto your RealDropzone™ website for the first time, they must enter a verification code which has been emailed to them after the registration wizard. I have received a number of requests for this feature to be removed, however there are some really good reasons to implement this system that are not immediately obvious.
The first reason is that this is a test to see if the customer’s email box is protected by a spam filter that will not allow your emails to be received. If a customer cannot receive emails from you they will not receive email confirmations of tandem reservations, or receipts for products being purchased. In the case of Gift Certificates this email contains the code that will need to be used to redeem the Gift Certificate, and in the case of Tandem Reservations these emails provide group numbers, times, and information they will need to know about how to prepare for their jumps.
All of our emails are sent from legitimate servers that have been secured from abuse from spammers and authorized with DNS entries on your domain. However even with these measures in place, many different anti-spam filters exist and it is impossible to know for sure that your emails will make it through.
The second very important reason for this verification code is to prevent robots from signing up on your website electronically in order to post spam advertisements into forums and other applications that allow users to submit data which will then be displayed to the public. Malicious robots are very present on the internet and are consistently looking for vulnerabilities that allow hackers access to use your web servers for personal gain. Spamming is one of the more profitable malicious activities and is very hard to police, and so protective measures must be incorporated to the website architecture itself.
If you receive an email from a customer who is frustrated because they did not receive a verification code and cannot sign on to your website, you will need to respond to their email with an alternate email address (such as a gmail or yahoo address). You can use the following form as a template to your response:
Hello {CustomerName},
We’re really sorry that you’re having trouble on our website. We use this email verification system to be sure that we can send emails to customers before they make a purchase with us. This is very important because we email receipts for purchase and these receipts sometimes contain codes necessary to redeem services, or provide information about how to prepare for a Skydive.
It is likely that a spam filter has blocked the email that we sent. Please check your ‘Junk Mail’ folder for an email from {DZEmailAddress}. If you cannot find the email there, please add {DZEmailAddress} to your ‘Safe Senders’ list so that you are able to receive emails from us.
If you’re still having trouble signing on to our website, you can always call our offices at {DZTelephone} during normal business hours, and we would be happy to take your reservation over the phone. If you receive this message while our office is closed, you can respond to this email with your telephone number requesting a call as soon as our office opens, or leave a message on our Voice Mail system.
We look forward to jumping with you!
{DZCompanyName}
{DZEmailAddress}
{DZTelephone}