I usually find the only way to get anything done with a big company is call them and go through their phone menu gauntlet. E-mailing and web forms seem to get ignored.
Cases in point, Verizon Wireless and Alltel. I e-mailed Verizon Wireless and webformed Alltel a couple weeks ago, neither have responded. I’ve since called Verizon and straightened things out, Alltel I have to find 30 minutes sometime to sit down and call them. Bleh.
Are my experiences typical? Why offer e-mail or webforms if you aren’t going to answer them?
In general, I agree. I e-mailed a prospective graduate school three weeks ago and still haven’t gotten a response. I got the answer in two minutes on the phone.
But speaking as someone who is on the receiving end of customer service related e-mails, most people really need to cool their jets. Just because you (general you) don’t get a response 30 seconds after you send it doesn’t mean it wasn’t read, isn’t being investigated, won’t be responded to. I think people expect e-mail to be faster than calling, but the truth is your e-mail has to be triaged just like any other incoming issue.
(I have spent several hours today working on a task for a client to try to get him e-mailed back by the end of the day… because I know if he doesn’t get a response the same day, he will freak out. Thus I am sensitive to this issue at the moment. Dude, I’m working as fast as I can! Chillax!)
I agree you shouldn’t expect a response in 30 seconds or even 30 minutes, but at least within 3 or 4 days would be nice. Or a nice “fuck off” to let you know they’re not going to answer!
Recently we sent an e-mail to verizon. While we never got a response, we did get an e-mail a week later from a different department asking us to ‘evaluate our customer service experience’ etc. etc. It said something along the lines of ‘…you recently e-mailed us…’ and they wanted to know how good a job they did of handling our concern.
You can imagine how I filled out that survey.
Yes. I often try to source supplies and shoot off an e to three or four companies. I’m lucky to get just one reply. I’ll encourage the boss to go with the most responsive one - not necessarily the first responder but the most helpful - even if it’s not the cheapest/best.
Hijack - Why do US sites in particular make you hunt around the site for their email address and use those irritating box thingies so you don’t know the address? I prefer to send an email from my own account so I have a record of it. Sometimes they don’t even have an email address at all on their web site. A toll free number isn’t much use from overseas people. There seems to be active discouragement for overseas business - many companies won’t even ship out side the US.
I imagine they get so much e-mail that they have to make it somewhat difficult to get the message through. But once they accept the message, they should answer it!
It is a spam reduction method. There are many, many bots that crawl websites pulling email addresses from mailto: links. If you have any email address like this, you will absolutely get hammered with spam in the long term. This is expensive, as well as causing emails to get ignored due to being flagged as a false positive.
(Forms can also be spammed, but, it is much less often. The bot actually has to navigate the form rather than just sending an email, and thus has to be significantly more sophisticated.)
Good companies will automatically send you an auto-response to your form submission indicating that it was successful. This would be emailed to you.
Email handling has become one of my customer service litmus tests. Generally, a company that can’t be bothered to set up decent email triage (getting back to you in a couple days at the absolute most) generally has other issues. I just don’t understand it - emails are so much faster to process for so many different types of issues - and you can work them 24 hours a day, so it’s easier to staff! But, so many companies just want to push you to call instead. Strange.
The other benefit of having a customer fill out a webform vs. emailing you is that it allows you to prompt the customer to provide some of the details you need to resolve their issue (or answer their questions)
I spent years dealing with customer emails, and I can’t tell you how often I’d get messages from a generic address like service@abcinc.com with a one liner like: “Please explain my last invoice.” No customer name, no account number, no info as to what he doesn’t understand on his invoice… or even which specific invoice he wants explained.
Sure, the customer will eventually get a response, but it may take a couple more email exchanges over the course of a week to identify who he is, what account he’s calling about, and what bill he’s talking about. Assuming there’s a problem with the bill, it may take another day or two to sort it out and apply adjustments to the account. Waste of everyone’s time and money, and easily fixed by using a webform that makes critical info like name and account number a required input.
Like fluiddruid says, a really good company uses an auto-responder to confirm they did get your message, and will also provide an approximate turnaround time for their reply (standard is usually 24-48 hrs for most companies)… if I don’t see one, I usually assume my email has disappeared into the void.
You’d think so, but no. I was recently looking for quotes on moving. Of three movers I found on the Web, all had online forms you could fill out, and they would supposedly e-mail you a quick ballpark quote. I filled them out (including my e-mail address), and never heard anything from two of them. The third had a person send me an e-mail three days later saying, “Thanks for your interest; please call me at [phone number] to arrange for a quote.”
At that point, I did what I should have done in the first place and reached for the Yellow Pages. Heck, why did I even bother with the Internet?
However, there are exceptions. I had a lovely correspondence with the people who make Bacon Salt when I wrote to ask them if there was any way I could place an order without going through PayPal. They were very helpful and personal - as they build their Bacon Salt Empire, I hope they never lose that down-home touch.
I agree with the OP that 3-4 days is not an unreasonable turn around time at all. I’ve had good experiences with e-mailing and bad experiences; I guess it just varies from company to company.
The answer is quite simple. Many companies use their call center staff to respond to emails during the slow time. If there is no slow time, the emails remain unanswered. If it is slow, the employees are busy goofing off rather than answering emails.
I worked “Customer Care” for a certain VOIP company that should be bankrupt. Here’s the deal:
All emails are filtered - certain words put it into certain queues. They do NOT go to a person or a group. It’s up to the CS reps to go into the queue and start pulling the messages out, and either give the canned response or do some investigative legwork and get back to the customer. Often, they will see it’s a technical issue and shunt it to the tech support queue. Or, it’s to find out about why the line keeps dropping after 15 seconds (tier 3 support).
Now, since this is an “additional” task, the priority is on answering calls and getting to the emails whenever there’s a lull (never). When I was there, it was almost 9 months behind, which triggered a special team of CS Green Berets to work the queue and get it down to within a month. I heard when I left that it was back up to about 3 months.
As someone who works in a contact centre for a company generally considered one of the best in the field for customer service, you may find the following illuminating:
As has been said, our principle job is answering the phone, e-mails get done in between calls. But they DO get done.
Before an e-mail can be sent out, it always has to be checked by a manager, who will often suggest changes, then it has to be checked again. This means responding takes significantly longer that may be supposed.
We cannot give out any account-specific info via e-mail (for security reasons), but we can on the phone if security checks have been taken. Therefore the phone is often preferred.
Often, the e-mail will enquire about something that requires further investigation, which can take a few days, particularly if another company is involved.
Our standard method for receivin queries is via a webform - this allows us to capture all the client’s details rather than just an e-mail address, so we can send them marketing in the future (unless the client tells us not to). We never pass details to anyone else, though.
VERY occasionally (like less than one in a thousand queries) something may not be responded to. But if you’re e-mailing a company and you don’t get a response, most likely they’re just a bad company.
Our target time for replying to all queries is 24-48 hours - but this does inevitably get stretched in busy periods.
I sent an email to Comcast yesterday morning and recieved a call back by noon and a resolution by 3pm. (of course it helped that I used all the corporate addresses listed on The Consumerist <some are bad addys>)
Thanks for your insight Dead Cat. Verizon and Alltel must be a very bad companys then! IIRC Verizon had a webform that asked for the acct # and things like that, with Alltel I responded to an e-mail they sent me.
Speaking of e-mail replies, another thing I hate is getting a form letter reply that doesn’t even apply to the problem I wrote about. IIRC PayPal and TracFone do this.
Typical in my industry is for companies to take at least 5 working days to deal with anything. The worst was one company who couldn’t even acknowledge queries until 20 working days had passed, and would then take about the same time to deal with it. They’re a little better now.
I should also note that the above generally applies to paperwork rather than responding to client enquiries - I don’t really know how other companies compare in this respect.