Dumb email responses from companies... (1 Viewer)

[Jay H]

Ever get really stupid responses to email sent to companies support line?

I sent an email to Harmon Kardon to try to get a part number for a light bulb for one of their tuners. About a week later I get a three lined reply not signed by anybody which says "Thank you for your email. Please call" " Thank you"


WTF@!!! If I wanted to sit on hold for 30 minutes I would of called them last week. I hate replies like that, why don't they just look up the damm part number and reply to me. What's the point of having an email address if all they are gonna do is tell you to call their number. Arrrgghhh.

Jay

 

[Charles J P]

I once sent an anti Pan-and-Scan email to Blockbuster asking that specific questions about their policies be addressed. It was obvious that they only half read it, because I got an email back regarding how they choose TITLEs (ie no unrated films, or pornography) and had nothing to do with format of the film! I even specifically asked to not send a pre-formatted response. Oh well.

 

[David-S]

marantz also sent me their number in reply to several questions i had from their website... the phone number was right above the email address, and i emailed you, guess that's how i wanted to be helped! {sigh}

 

[KyleS]

Yep frustrating. The worst part is that it would really be worth their time and money to encourage email use. Their tech support people can actually multi-task email questions that come in where the phones they are limited to 1 person at a time.

KyleS

 

[Charles J P]

I also like Bose's standardized response about how they dont give out any specs because [get this] they can be misleading. HAHAHAHAHA. Yeah, specifications are misleading, while marketing is the truth.

 

[MarcVH]

Yes, but that's also the problem -- it's very easy to send somebody an email, so lots of customers will do it and then expect answers. On the other hand, if you can make them wait a half hour on the phone, lots of them will just give up and go away, which reduces the number of questions to be answered.

 

[Jay H]

I see your reasoning, but then why have email in the first place then. They do have to pay somebody to maintain some program to auto-respond to them and it's certainly not condusive to customer relations. This makes me think that they simply have an autoresponder to every single email sent to them. Now by sending everybody with a legitamate question to the phone number you get tons of pissed off customers sitting on hold wasting a phone operators time when it would be so easy for somebody to look it up. They could easily filter out the easy answers by autoresponding with a FAQ and then the more serious questions can be forwarded to somebody who can answer it. That's the way to handle email and some companies do that. To simply say "Call so and so" seems a waste of bandwidth (and my time) to me.

Jay