Does any company ever give customers a straight answer to an e-mail asking for help? One reader's recent experiences prompted him to ponder that question.
"I've begun to realize lately that no customer 'service' organization is able to successfully answer email support questions," the reader wrote. "No matter who it is, the first email to request information or to report a problem always comes back with an answer that has nothing to do with the question asked and often is just a repeat of easily-found information from the vendor's own Web site. They must think that we are unable to find this information on our own or the response is from a robot based on matching -- poorly -- words within the support request. EBay is the worst and there is no other way to communicate with them other than their support Web forms."
What really got the reader thinking though was the runaround he experienced when trying to use a free trial offer for RealNetwork's Rhapsody music download service that was sent to him by his cable modem service, Road Runner. "I've been a fairly happy Time-Warner/Road Runner customer for several years now, and this Rhapsody offer was included in a monthly newsletter of other offers," the reader wrote. "They said 'no credit card information necessary for the trial.' I followed a link in the e-mail they sent me. That page also said 'no credit card information necessary for the trial.' The first two times I tried to sign up I got as far as entering my name and address and so on. When I clicked on Next, I just got recycled back to the first page again."
Finally the reader was able to get past that page. "This put me on a page which asked for ... you guessed it ... a credit card number," the reader wrote. "I sent two different e-mails to Road Runner support and never got a reply. I sent one to Rhapsody and after a wait of nearly a week -- during which time I decided I'd never sign up for such a poorly-supported program anyway -- I got an email from Rhapsody telling me that credit cards were the only supported payment method. But they were open to suggestions on what other payment methods they should accept in the future. But I'd sure like to know if others have this kind of experience or if it's just me."
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