Back in 2010 and before it was easy to get customer service through email. You could ask them a question, or deal with the problem through email and always get an answer and usually the correct answer. They would always respond. I have noticed in the past several years it has been increasingly difficult to get any kind of customer service through email. Usually you have to end up calling them to get anything done or get any real answer. I remember one incident in particular where I was trying to get a company to honor their warranty for product that broke. After jumping through a million hoops through email I completed the final step that should have resulted in them sending me a new product but when I sent it to them they just never responded and I had to call them to fix the problem. And I have noticed in the past year or two especially since Covid started, although it was a problem even before Covid that they will often just not respond to your email. I even did a test where I emailed the same question to five different companies and only two of them responded. How are these employees not getting fired for ignoring customers emails? And why can’t you get any kind of good customer service through email all the sudden when it was just fine before 2010?
Cutbacks in staff.
For the sake of investor profits. Short-sighted in my view, but I don’t run any companies.
Support moved to Facebook and Chat and other social media.
Since I’m an old fart, and work with old farts, I think it’s sad: MSmail and gMail have become so good at detecting spam that it’s not a big problem. But perhaps companies that aren’t using gMail etc are still flooded with spam, are still loosing email, and just can’t be bothered.
And, many (though not all) companies now have a “Contact Us” form on their web sites, which can be filled out and sent on to their customer service departments. Those forms contain the same info that you’d put in an email, but without it being labeled as possible spam by the company.
One advantage of using a “contact us” form is that the issue may more easily be processed by customer management software.
My well educated guess is that too many companies don’t have a dedicated email team for service related issues, if it sales related, it’ll get routed there to a hungry commission based employee.
But if it’s service related, often the same people who answer the phones are also supposed to do emails. Either the phones are slammed and there’s no time for emails or else the phones are slow and they just ignore the emails since it’s no one’s direct responsibility.
I recently had a problem with a company I did bought something from. Their first way to contact them was thru live chat. Unfortunately, the chat people have absolutely no ability to problem solve anything. After stating my problem, they said nothing could be done and disconnected me. Twice.
So I filled out a contact form. Nothing but silence for a week. I fill out another contact form. This time I get a reply that Some Guy will contact me in 2 business days. One week later, still nothing.
So I decided to move into the 21st century and opened a Twitter account. One complaint on their Twitter feed saying what my problem was and suddenly they couldn’t wait to talk to me, as long as we did it off Twitter.
I sent them an email, they sent one back. Problem solved in 10 minutes.
I think some companies just don’t care that much about complaints that are done privately. It’s only when you go public that they “care.” And, who knows, maybe one day in the future I may need to use Twitter again.
I don’t think it has to do with profit because I have had government organization such as the health department not respond to my email, or with spam as someone else mentioned because I’ve had companies not respond to my email even when I filled out the form on their site. I have also had many times where I have been emailing someone back-and-forth and if you ask them a question that they don’t know the answer to immediately or have to do any kind of work to look something up they just don’t respond.
I have had this problem both with global companies, local companies, even government organizations like the health department. I don’t understand how they are not worried that they will get fired for just ignoring customers.
I think the reason it has gotten worse since Covid started is that many customer service employees are working from home now and it must be harder for their boss to keep an eye on them and make sure they’re doing their job properly and responding to emails. But this was a problem even before Covid started so that doesn’t explain it entirely.
I had a similar experience with a company completely ignoring my repeated attempts to contact them through every available medium. But 20 minutes after my negative Yelp review, they called me, wanting to “make it right.”
Maybe eight years ago I did contact two different companies on twitter one was a grocery store and one was a restaurant because they were putting something in a food I like that I was allergic to. I asked them if they could remove this thing I was allergic to from their food, they said they would and then they never did. I don’t know if things have changed since but I am concerned about companies just saying things on twitter to make it appear they are trying to fix the problem and then not actually fixing it.
Out of curiosity, did they actually, explicitly, promise to remove the allergen, or did they say something less committal, like, “we will look into it/we will consider it”? And, was it a big company/big restaurant chain, or a small local place?
If it was a bigger company/chain, it would be highly unusual for them to reply to a single customer, who has a specific ingredient complaint, with an absolute commitment to change their recipe.
Here’s a common customer service problem that hasn’t been mentioned in this thread yet:
You call or write customer service with a specific question or complaint, and you get a very generic response that reads like a pre-scripted form letter that only vaguely addresses your query, if at all.
Of course, these customer service people are not allowed to say a sentence, phrase, or word to you unless it’s been reviewed and approved by Legal.
Thus, instead, they have a menu of pre-written generic responses, all written by the lawyers, for all the common questions. So they just point-and-click on whichever form letter seems to most closely address your question, and that’s what you get sent.
We don’t accept service requests by email. Users who do that are directed to make an account if they don’t already have one, and lodge a support ticket via our ZenDesk site. This is to ensure we are only helping genuine customers, not the vast number of software pirates who’ve stolen our games.
I think this really makes a difference. A single complaint to a large company is likelier to be ignored than a one to a smaller company. It will often take a lot of tweets or retweets before a big company will step up.
This is a good set up for your business, makes total sense. Not being much of a gamer, I gotta admit I never even considered that pirates would do that. Pretty ballsy!
Seeing this thread bumped reminded me of a rather prolific poster we had a couple of years back that complained on the Dope about some winter floor mats for his pickup that were not up to par for some reason. He said he complained and got nowhere. Then someone from the company signed up and offered to take care of his complaints, up to including replacing them. There was some back and forth between the two which led me to believe the story the Doper told was not quite what really happened. IIRC, his final stance was that he just couldn’t do business with that company anymore, even being given new mats. Strangely, he stopped posting completely after that thread.
Best email chain I’ve been part of that is an example of that
Me: The rubber feet have come off my laptop. It is still under warranty, can you send me new ones?
Dell: Have you tried reinstalling Windows?
Me: How will reinstalling Windows return the rubber feet to the bottom of my laptop?
Dell: Oh, yeah, what’s your shipping address?
I can understand in your case. The one I hate is when companies send me an email, and then say “this email address is not monitored.” Well to you too! Nice that you think you can email me, but I can’t email you.
Just recently I dealt with a small company that the “unmonitored” address in their emails was the exact same address as the “contact us” address on their website. I sent a message to the address, but never heard back. I finally had to call (queue boomers: “what’s so hard about calling?”)