customer contact pet peeves
here's one for you... when large corporations fail to have any way to contact someone via their web site, or bury the form / link in such a way as to avoid any actual contact with their visitors. i find this a lot with media sites, recently vh1.com when i was looking for an old barenaked ladies video, and when i did get something i was looking for, it said my mac was unsupported because i needed windows media player. well, i did. maybe not the latest version, but all i wanted to see was a streaming video. wmp even does that. so i wanted to issue a complaint.... um... okay. where do i do that again?
the counterpoint to this is those web sites where nothing BUT online assistance is offered. even finding a physical street address is either a chore or an impossible task. our recent difficulties in receiving an iphoto book for a xmas present for a relative is a good example of that. gosh, that was fun. "where is our book?" get the tracking number from apple, enter it into the usps site, no results.
(sidebar pet peeve that almost drove my wife and i to KILL: the usps has no way, from their customer service line, to actually talk to a live person, yet the answering service continually mimics a real person with "i didn't understand what you just said... could you please repeat it?" over and over and over and... even though they say ON THEIR FRIGGIN' SITE that the number is STAFFED by customer service REPRESENTATIVES)
anyway, back to iphoto, go to apple. they have an email form which they will reply to within 48 hours. well, while that's great, it's the night before xmas f'n eve, and if there's a problem, i don't want to find out at 5 p.m. xmas eve. so back to apple. nowhere can i find a number, so i call 1-800-my-apple, and EVEN USE THE IPHOTO OPTION for queries to talk to someone. when i get someone, and give them the order number, they tell me "we don't have access to iphoto orders in our system." well, can you give me a phone number to contact someone who can? "no sir, we don't have any access to that information." who the hell is making these photo books, the CIA?
so we finally managed to track down what had happened with our own ingenuity and harassing postal workers at two different local offices when they opened to find the missing book (which had been mislabeled and had been stamped "return to sender."). but absolutely no thanks to any of the wondrous automated services above.
oh, and we did get a reply back from the "iphoto team" -- a boilerplate message saying "thank you for your iphoto order. if the items is undeliverable, it will be returned to sender and your purchase will be refunded." and we got that message xmas day. really helpful...
oh heck, and i saw this from adobe's website the other day, from someone else's blog. see if you can find the logic problem here...
the counterpoint to this is those web sites where nothing BUT online assistance is offered. even finding a physical street address is either a chore or an impossible task. our recent difficulties in receiving an iphoto book for a xmas present for a relative is a good example of that. gosh, that was fun. "where is our book?" get the tracking number from apple, enter it into the usps site, no results.
(sidebar pet peeve that almost drove my wife and i to KILL: the usps has no way, from their customer service line, to actually talk to a live person, yet the answering service continually mimics a real person with "i didn't understand what you just said... could you please repeat it?" over and over and over and... even though they say ON THEIR FRIGGIN' SITE that the number is STAFFED by customer service REPRESENTATIVES)
anyway, back to iphoto, go to apple. they have an email form which they will reply to within 48 hours. well, while that's great, it's the night before xmas f'n eve, and if there's a problem, i don't want to find out at 5 p.m. xmas eve. so back to apple. nowhere can i find a number, so i call 1-800-my-apple, and EVEN USE THE IPHOTO OPTION for queries to talk to someone. when i get someone, and give them the order number, they tell me "we don't have access to iphoto orders in our system." well, can you give me a phone number to contact someone who can? "no sir, we don't have any access to that information." who the hell is making these photo books, the CIA?
so we finally managed to track down what had happened with our own ingenuity and harassing postal workers at two different local offices when they opened to find the missing book (which had been mislabeled and had been stamped "return to sender."). but absolutely no thanks to any of the wondrous automated services above.
oh, and we did get a reply back from the "iphoto team" -- a boilerplate message saying "thank you for your iphoto order. if the items is undeliverable, it will be returned to sender and your purchase will be refunded." and we got that message xmas day. really helpful...
oh heck, and i saw this from adobe's website the other day, from someone else's blog. see if you can find the logic problem here...