Slashdot Mirror
Modest Proposal To Companies: Let Your Customers Respond To Your Emails - Kill no-reply@ (medium.com)
An anonymous reader shares a blogpost: Dear way-too-many companies, if you're allowed to send me an email, I'm allowed to send you an email. You just sent me an email and I have a question. Don't make me hunt for a way to ask it. Email already has a built-in way to do that -- reply. Whether it's good news or bad news, whether you're an established company or a startup, your customers will love you more if you let them reply to your emails.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Web forms are NOT email. Don't put a link on your website saying "email us" if it points to a web form.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Obviously, the author of this nonsense doesn't 1) Understand b2c communication and 2) Doesn't understand how to run a customer care center.
Take off your rose colored glasses for minute. First of all, no-reply emails are a means to notify a customer of something. They are one-way. They are not meant to be responded to like text message notifications of upcoming appointments or Amazon shipping notifications. Second, actually learn about call centers and customer care teams. You obviously have no clue. It's a lot harder than you think. Most call centers are fielding a variety of customer interactions like phone calls, emails and chat. They are also usually understaffed due to cost constraints. Before you write about something like you have no clue what you're talking about go learn what it takes to run one of these. If you do that, then you might not just complain about a lack of something, you might also have a suggestion as to how what you want ought to be done. Good luck
We'll make great pets
My company doesn't want your opinion on our policies but still want your money. Signed, Anonymous CEO
Dear customer:
Thank you for your reply.
We value your input.
This is an automated reply to let you know that your email is 276,709th in line to be answered, and we will get to it as soon as possible.
Your estimated wait time is, well, you don't want to know. You really, really, do not want to know.
Sincerely,
Marvin, your robotic email automated response robot.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
... I can very much agree with this. HOWEVER, I *also* am painfully aware of how incredibly stupid and annoying people are. Allowing them to send replies to all sorts of automated e-mails would be a nightmare. After all, this isn't 1991, with only reasonably intelligent Internet users... which should also be painfully obvious.
Maybe, just maybe, you should consider using a different address then? It seems you really do accept replies, so why send from no-reply? You're discouraging your nice and polite users, while not discouraging the idiots. Seems somewhat the opposite of what you should want.
No replay email addresses are for automated notifications. If you really, really, really want to contact someone, check out the contact page on the website. You might find an email address, a contact form or maybe phone number.
I saw the title and worried this was going to be about eating babies.
#DeleteChrome
Go run a company or actually just work for one, there is a reason companies do this for certain communications. If you look in those emails 99%+ of the time, there is contact information.
Since you've very obviously never worked in any large company or for anyone of that matter who uses email, you'll know that people hit reply and say "thanks" or some other pointless and useless response a lot. Those "no-reply" emails, if they were not just dead ends would be getting 100s or 1000s of replies to every email blast that happened with a very tiny percentage of legitimate questions.
The "no-reply" address will never go away as long as email exists.
You're an idiot. Go away.
Yes and there are far more appropriate places to discuss this. Don't just blast out your opinions anywhere you can.
Yeah, we need a reply test bot - if it doesn't get through, neither does the email.
The "No-Reply" emails are 99.9% robots that send you a "personalized" preset.
The ones where an actual person has sent you an email, you can reply to without going through the ordeal of going to their website and finding the "contact us" page.
You don't get to reply to a robot, you really think companies have infinite resources for them to allocate dozens of customer reps to handle replies from idiots who don't understand something in an email?
What is this "âSreply" technology? Is it like "AI"? I need to invest in this!
Most of those addresses are manned. Seriously. Just because a company doesn't WANT you to reply, doesn't mean they aren't prepared for it.
Assuming someone is being paid to read all of your pointless questions.
Trust me, there's going to be a fuck load of pointless questions...
I tend to rant.
Most companies I email, i get a useless form letter response several days later. Or they respond with their phone number and tell me to call. If they want it to be useful, have someone who can actually read your question and respond as a human, with real information.
There's a reason they don't do that anymore: they're tired of being spammed into oblivion by spambots just because they have an accessible email address.
Thanks, we'll get back to you on that, right after we finish answer every other customer contact on the phone and webchat.
Interpretation - that'll be never. The only reason why phone and webchat requests slowdown is because people don't want to wait and have something else to do, or because the business hours end.
The problem with a mailbox for actual replies from email marketing emails is those damn out of office replies.
Someone has to sift through hundreds, or thousands every send to find the actual messages.
Yes, mail rules can be setup to filter OOO emails from outlook, because all emails have a predictable subject line. Gmail for Business, on the other hand does not and let's the user set their own out of office subject line.
The objective is to discourage ALL inbound emails.
Email: customer writes an ACTUAL ESSAY about whatever fucking insane hallucination is bothering them today, but someone has to read it all because if a single paragraph is actually relevant, they need to jump on it.
Phone: the call handler can ask closed questions to get to the crux of the matter quickly.
Source: experience
There are lots of automated report systems. My company does one and we use no-reply because the reports are something you set up. If you have a problem with them we want you to go through customer support where the call can be tracked and followed up on instead of just a blind email to a pile in a folder that you hope someone will get to someday.
No, the comment got modded down because it's mind-suckingly vacuous, offensive, and off-topic.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Requires companies to EXPAND their workforce to have people to reply to the emails ... and the whole point of automated emails is so they can cut staff.
The two efforts are polar opposites.
No reply is actually a good policy. Why? Because if the e-mail is spoofed, people could get phished. The problem is that companies don't take no-reply far enough. They put URLs in the e-mail, defeating the security inherent in the no-reply.
If it became widely understood that reply and URLs in e-mails from companies are illegitimate, we could stop a lot of phishing.
Buddy, Jews attacking New York would make as much sense as you attacking your own mosque.
Stay tuned!
I can't figure out how to stay tuned. Please help. I've adjusted my tinfoil hat every way possible and this still makes no sense. I've tried regular tinfoil. I tried heavy-duty tinfoil. I tried aluminized mylar film and I even tried that film from my eclipse glasses. Where did you get your tinfoil hat?
This needs to be legal legislation; no "no reply" emails. If you send me shit, I want to reply to an actual human, not a fucking blackhole inbox.
An anonymous reader shares a blogpost:
And an empty-brained editor decided, for some reason, that everyone needs to know about it.
By all means, have an email conversation with the office scanner.
I think the world is large enough to fit discussions on both 9/11 conspiracy theories and e-mail netiquette.
Today my coworker configured a no-reply@ account, though I failed him in the code review for using a mail template with an XHTML doctype and HTML5 syntax. First thing Monday I'll also check whether we're leaving a reasonable way of getting in touch with the company.
Thank you for your message. I will be on vacation from October 3-7. If you need immediate assistance, call 867-5309
Thank you for your reply. Your email is very important to us. We will respond as soon as possible.
Because the people running the business side of things are BARELY smarter than the customers. Seriously. The way they use email around here is just absurd.
Just fuck off already. You're an asshole, you're an idiot, and you're just plain wrong about every stupid thing you believe. Do you ever stay up late at night wondering whether anyone likes you? They don't. Because you're a stupid prick who makes the world worse, just by being here.
Then don't reply to the "no-reply" emails!
As I said, you're currently discouraging your polite and intelligent users, while not discouraging the idiots. Why would anyone want to purposely select to only provide support to the idiots?
Nobody buys your astroturf bullshit, dummy. Unlike you, we aren't gullible dipshits. Just fuck right off out of here.
If you really believe that your ignorant, racist rant is "truthful", then log in and post it under your name, you fucking pussy.
So there's a class of companies in that category...
There is another class of company that uses 'no-reply' because they are fixated on a particular engagement model that forces issues into tracket tickets and set of tools to manage them that doesn't know how to deal with email. They don't trust the user to keep an email thread intact to allow someone to follow the history, or they don't have software they trust to translate email thread to a ticketing system.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
So I assume you expect companies to hire another person to sort through all the emails and direct them to the correct department... if any?
Part of the reason companies have set emails is organization. They don't want tech questions coming to the finance department. No marketing vendors emailing the ops team and so on. When customers receive a general email like that it gets abused with random questions, often completely unrelated to the email that waste a lot of time that could be used for actual customer service.
And thus was born the automated phone menu, and the anguished cries of a billion souls who did know exactly what they needed to say and could have said it at least three times before they even got to speak to a real person.
Mind you, I bought something from Dell over the phone the other day, and I felt like I spent most of the call debugging the scripts their people were clearly reading from, so maybe it's not the automated aspect that is really the problem here...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
What? Are you kidding? This is just an attempt by MySpace to drive traffic away from Facebook.
Why would anyone want to purposely select to only provide support to the idiots?
Maybe they're in the lottery or alternative medicine business?
Did someone let reality escape?
Companies don't really want to reply to customers unless that customer is performing a public review or statement. The Internet makes it far too easy to reply to a company for no real reason. (Oh my parcel arrived 10 minutes late or the packaging is dented). Sure, we'd like perfection. But we ain't going to get it.
We need a system rather like the eBay score system on a company that allows us to report a cockup by email. Then let them respond. It would have to be secure with people vouching for each other as genuine. It's the only way to make them listen. Make it a part of the Review process?
Companies only listen to high status reviewers on Twitter, YouTube or Facebook during their brief product launch. So let's hear about companies that don't want to talk to customers in the Review? We can make it better.
Stuart http://stuarthalliday.com/
Lets enumerate all the problems with this, shall we?
-spam
-customers who reply with inappropriate things, like requests for support on a sales announcement, or other nonsense
-Out of Office replies
-SPAM
-Probably plenty of issues that didn't immediately pop into my head.
-unsubscribe requests
You then have to hire additional staff just to sift through the quagmire of emails to discard or route the emails to more appropriate destinations.
The convenience to the customer is minor. The burden on an organization to deal with such a system would be massive, possibly insurmountable.
Companies that WANT your questions will allow it. The ones that use no-reply are the ones that don't want to hear from you to begin with.
Amazon lost my order. It was their delivery system that just lost it. They sent me an email asking me to contact them. The email was "no-reply". It was actually a bit of work to figure out how to correctly contact them, as none of the required options matched my situation. In the end, they refunded my order. But the please contacts us, but don't reply was silly. I'm not sure why a human had to be involved at all.
For once I do believe the 2 ACs are different persons!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
that's the unasked question about customer service. People will _always_ say yes. But when it's time to vote with their wallet more often than not it's really 'no'. There's a balance to be struck there. I think it was Sprint (mighta been Verizon) that once got a list of their top problem customers, the ones that called in almost daily, fought every little thing and in fact cost the company money, and asked them all to find a new carrier since it obviously wasn't working out between them. There are just times when you have to do that. Tough love, so to speak.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Please hire me at your company that can afford to prefer polite customers.
Most companies probably fit your category. I see many "noreply@company.com" as the return address from service announcements from companies that we have an established relationship with (otherwise we would never get their service announcements in the first place).
Then there are the other kind that is practically worse, I'm the recipient on several mail delivery lists for mutual funds (yes ever changing excel sheets sent via mail are the #1 distribution method of mutual fund companies...) and it seams that it's standard there to have these delivery lists be open so as soon as some other (of the thousands of connected companies) writes a reply in order to question the distributor it's bounced to all the members, at which point some one else replies with "please don't send this to me" which bounces yet another round, and so it goes.
but nobody would read them.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
It should be obvious to the author there are automated notification-only emails which have no-reply. One reason why so many companies refuse to offer a general email address is because end users will naturally use it when they encounter a problem with the product or service.
Ideally, we could use email to communicate about our problems, but even technology aware people and most Slashdot readers have no idea how to write a complaint (i.e., bug report). The general population is even worse. The content of messages to a general email address will take the form of: "It doesn't work." No model information or software version/platform, no explanation of what was attempted, no when or where, or anything helpful at all. This wastes time on both sides. So, we end up with web contact forms that typically try to pry some information out of the end user that would be helpful to resolve the problem.
Buddy, Jews attacking New York would make as much sense as you attacking your own mosque.
Or NAMBLA attacking Marlin Brando films.
This space unintentionally left blank.
The people running big companies, especially big near-monopolies, think that they get to unilaterally define the terms of all communication. They want the customer to think long and hard before they dare to ask for something to be made right. This is done by making it as painful as possible to talk to a representative and if you are lucky enough to actually get to speak to a person it will likely be someone with no authority to resolve a problem and who will just hide behind the excuse that the "their system" won't allow them to do what needs to be done.
The no-reply thing even happens with snail mail. I once received an erroneous medical bill which I sent back with a letter explaining why the bill was in error. The payment processing center decided that they could not be bothered with two-way communication and simply reported me to collections.
You're missing the point. this company is choosing to actively reward the idiots vs the polite customers. They ARE choosing to limit their customer base to exclude polite people.
I'm suggesting that they'd be better off choosing to do business with both, rather than only with the idiots.
I'm not suggesting that you can afford to work only with good customers, but when you have some, why discourage them in favour of the idiots?
I wonder if the submmiter and editors are aware that a title like this usually implies a reference to Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal ? Because, despite we customers being food for companies, I'm failing to see a connection of TFS or TFA to the essay (synopsis below):
Swift suggests that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You're right, the automation itself isn't to blame, the cause is a whole number of factors:
- Shareholders gotta make that dollar ... and you try to cram a good customer journey in somewhere in between.
- Managers gotta slack off
- Prices gotta be low
- Employees gotta eat
As an example, I'm implementing a bunch of new email templates right now. The company we paid to produce them handed them over months ago it seems, and it's clear that nobody that will be using them has even been able to proof read them yet.
If it sounds like my role is weird, well it is: I'm the only coder on payroll, and my job-title is customer services. This is a major national retailer.
I never said it was a good idea, after all we're only human.
You have the choice not to do business with those companies.
Technically correct, but it ends up being a Hobson's choice. Some businesses are monopolies, such as the power company, the water company, the natural gas company, and in many cases the wired Internet company. Good luck doing without those, especially if you are a landlord who is required by law to offer these utilities to tenants.
This is a non-story
The remainder of your comment relies on relative privation.
Think about it - if you were running a very large company, would you rather: a) have a catch-all email that runs the gamut of issues, feedback, etc. b) have a way to submit categorized feedback via web forms? I'd much rather have the latter. It can be easily routed to the proper department by issue type, enforce that certain fields are filled in, etc. My suggestion is make sure an email contains clear links on how to provide feedback, not necessarily allow direct replies.
Don't feed the trolls.
Post your email here so we may properly reply to you.
I'd be happy if they just responded to their damn mail in the first place. There's a large percentage of places that I've used the form to contact the company or the email address that I've found on their site to get in touch with someone from a company asking about a product that I want to buy or use and I never hear back from them. It's at least 50%. Why do these companies bother with the forms or email addresses if they don't answer messages?
For example, I wanted to know where my property line was so I contacted four surveying companies via their websites. Only one got back to me. This was for a fence that I'm going to build. No manufacturers responded to my questions because I wanted to do it myself and I asked them for copies of instructions as their sites didn't have it. I'm doing it myself because the fencing companies are terrible in my area. About half don't respond to email. The only company that I liked when they came by for a quote never emailed the quote even when I followed up for it. The other companies spent their time putting down the competition and telling me how they didn't like my yard.
I've sent messages off to ask about replacement parts or to ask about information that isn't on websites all without hearing back from companies. These are all things that can easily be handled by email and are cheaper for the company to do that way rather than have me call up. Yet by not responding they force me to call, in the case of getting a replacement part, or take my business elsewhere.
You're assuming that companies want to talk to their customers. They don't. The best customer is the one who pays the bill and makes no noise.
By making it increasingly difficult to contact companies for any kind of support or assistance, they've muted their customers. Why would they want to undo this?
Are you under the illusion that companies actually care?
"If you were running a very large company would you rather: a) have a catch-all phone number that runs the gamut of issues, feedback, etc. b) have an automated phone tree to categorizes feedback and may resolve customer issues more quickly?"
If you're on the autism spectrum the answer seems obvious, yet choice b is so universally despised that it has a well-known name ('phone tree hell', if you've been living under a rock) and several businesses have been spawned for the sole purpose of helping customers defeat it. GetHuman, Bringo, Fonolo, etc.
Lmao!!! ZIFN4B has a shitty job!!!
Let's all point at him and laugh. Seriously the "constraints" you're talking about is really just someone in your company fucking you and your customers. You should punish them and show a little self respect by working to get a better job.
You should also talk down to your boss in a condescending way during your exit interview and then when he talks about maybe you will need his reference or maybe you will want to come back one day..... laugh until you cry when you explain that he has a shitty job... tell him to have a little self respect and quit like I'm telling you now.
since u might ask stupid questions like comment ^^
Now imagine a company getting a few hundred stupid questions like yours routed people not trained to answer it.
Are you the kind of guy who thinks a greeter at Walmart knows how to fix a TV?
I work at a MASSIVE company and we deal with tons of useless shit "logic and filters" are fine but maybe setting them up is beyond your staff of MCSEs
No-reply has its purpose. The problem is it's been abused.
The original intention is for user-initiated notifications like password resets, or other automated notifications from sources other than newsletters.
Unfortunately some (most) places forgot what the purpose of no-reply was.
Also, the email landscape has changed slightly over the years. Transactional email services (like Sendgrid, Mailgun, etc) have changed the way we send emails.
Since sending transactional emails is usually decoupled from the primary email service, it makes it difficult to reply to an outgoing only address. In most cases you can set a Reply-to address, but for some reason businesses are not setting it.
I think you are on the money there, at least in part, but there are other reasons too. The amount of spam, phishing and virus laden junkmail directed at companies is already pretty significant. The online forms that integrate a captcha and require some information prevent spammers from having yet another easy avenue of streaming garbage or worse into your business.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
The problem is that if you respond to their email there is an assumption that you want somebody to read your response...and respond to your response. That can get expensive in a hurry for the company who may get thousands of support emails a day.
A lot of effort (and $) goes into trying to deflect support calls with automated attendants, FAQs, user support communities, chatbots and even old-fashioned support articles or <gasp> better design. But of course some support calls (and emails) still happen.
If you allow customers to respond to support emails a lot of them will. And now you have a support agent spending more time reading and responding to each of those messages. Support costs up. Profits down. More satisfied customers? Maybe yes, maybe no.
Unfortunately these days making the shareholders happy seems to be more important than making the staff or the customers happy. Shareholders want more profits and that means lower costs and that means not paying add'l support agents to sit there answering long email threads.
-B-
Sending emails === Potential for additional sales
Receiving emails === Guarantee of additional costs
Requiem for the American Dream
Like hi I just bought X how do I turn it on?
Write something to the effect "Instructions to turn on your device are on page 2 of the Setup Guide." and give a link to the HTML version of the guide.
Small businesses often thrive because they have the flexibility to provide personalized support to their clients.
Then why not structure a large business as a collection of small businesses?
Is your customer base small enough? Hint: if you have e.g. millions of customers, no-reply is a must.
It's not the absolute size as much as the ratio of tier 1 support personnel per customer.
Just set your email server to reject any email from no-reply@
This. If we wanted you to reply, we wouldn't put "no-reply". Now buy my crap and freak off.
This is an automated reply to let you know that your email is 276,709th in line to be answered, and we will get to it as soon as possible.
By itself, this appears a step in the right direction. If I know your company's small army of support staff answered, say, half a million messages last week, I know to expect information on which I can act in three business days.
But then Marvin blows it with this refusal to provide any sort of scale for how quickly the queue moves:
Your estimated wait time is, well, you don't want to know. You really, really, do not want to know.
What's the name of your company? Maybe if we publicize the problem from your perspective it will be self-correcting...
Requiem for the American Dream
Why is this vacation auto-reply not rate-limited to one mail per (sender, recipient) address pair per week?
Can you refrain from sending me emails ever again?
This and:
Dear modest consumer:
You don't have a fucking clue regarding our business model, strategy, or tactic.
If you did, you'd be sending DoNotReply shit to us.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
No-Reply is awesome, because it lets me send auto-replay e-mail based EULAs regarding how my E-mail is used. Violate it - your ass pays. You still received the contract.
It's a nice lucrative thing since they're to scared to get their precious usage of EULA nullified. You just sue in Small Claims, they never show up, send the court-ordered payment to their company, get the check a few days later.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Dude, seriously. It won't work. Just stop. You've convinced yourself you're about to collect money or set legal precedent. In reality.... No.
No, the comment got modded down because it's mind-suckingly vacuous, offensive, and off-topic.
Yet the only reason most people saw it was because YOU replied to it.
DON'T FEED THE TROLLS.
If you have mod points, then mod them down.
Otherwise IGNORE THEM.
Provoking a response is exactly what they are trying to do.
Thanks to you, they were successful.
Software can triage email coming in, and failing that, round robin the email to humans who may not know how to answer, but know their own company well enough to quickly bounce to someone who will.
Already email analysis is a fact of life (spam and phishing), having customer relationship management as part of that doesn't seem such a stretch.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Got news for ya.
I've filed and won already using this method.
Come back when you've got good legal experience. I took on Electronic Arts and won. When you can handle huge corporate lawyers, feel free to return to this conversation.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It could be argued that even those user initiated notifications warrant a way of replying. For example I got an email notification of a password reset on an account that I did *not* ask for. In this case it was encouraged to reply if this was not the case, while also unable to continue without my assenting.
Anytime you receive a message toward one human, it just makes sense for that human to be able to reach back and engage with another human because the automated context may not always be what it seems.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This wouldn't have been a problem if it hadn't been for companies polluting the email system with endless advertising to begin with. If it had just remained a channel for communication, accepting emails would not have been a problem at all.
If you are sending with No-Reply@ as your FROM address and the delivery fails, how are you going to fix your mailing list when you don't get the delivery failure notice? Do that too many times and your delivery failure rate will go up and most ISPs will decide you are a spammer and cut you off completely. Businesses sending email need valid FROM addresses so they can actively manage their relationship with their customers, which includes making sure email addresses are current and valid, and it is easy for their customers to contact them.
Citation needed. We need to be able to laugh our collective asses off at your sources too, so stop holding out on us.
Maybe he just hates himself? I would, if I was him.
And yet, for every one caller who knows exactly what to say, there are probably 1000 who don't. Different types of calls (for an ISP: calling about a problem with the service, asking about prices and ordering a new service etc) usually are answered by different people (sales vs troubleshooting for example), so it would be best if the company had multiple phone numbers where you can call. However, people will routinely call the wrong number and then bitch that the sales guy cannot tell them to reboot their router. Also, having one number is better, because it is easier to remember. Thus, the automated menu was born, hopefully routing most of the callers to the correct employees. Of course, there will be some who have some weird problem and the none of the menu options are correct, but they can choose a random option and the employee who answers will transfer them. The idea is to make these transfers infrequent.
Although, I know of one company where no matter which menu option you choose (there are three), you will be routed to the same employee (the company is small, they only have one employee answering phones).
Nope. Fuck that class of company too, because it's ultimately the same damn thing. Fundamentally, companies are either willing to engage on the customer's terms... or they aren't. And the latter don't deserve anyone's business.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If I were running a very large company, I would want everyone to be forced to just give me their money instead of having to go through the trouble of actually selling something to them in return.
But I wouldn't be entitled to that -- just like how companies are not entitled to be able to dictate communications terms to their customers, either!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Will allow you to find the company officers, board members etc. Just try variations on their names. Only last name, firstname.lastname and so on. Yeah it's a bit of a hoop to jump through but if you aim for the top - they will definitely light a fire under someones ass.
When noreply addresses are used, companies avoid having to filter through thousands of bounced/undelivered messages.
If you need support, send an email to support. How is this so hard?
Having had a front row seat to one of those, they are afraid they'll look like ignorant idiots if they try to engage to open ended emails to their company. They are afraid of setting the expectation they could help via email, and then get judged poorly when they fail at trying. They might have an incredibly disparate set of products bearing their name.
I don't know them personally, but imagine if you emailed 'help@honeywell.com'. Honeywell has everything from little home space heaters to military UAVs to Airport landing systems. Such a company may be concerned that without some requiring some context, that they'll bumble the reply and it will look poorly.
Of course, a 'nice' thing would be software that analyzes and engages in a 'phone tree' like auto-reply if it can't figure it out. A nicer thing would be a few humans to sort it out.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
the same folks here demanding this
will also bitch when the company in question raises the prices to cover the costs involved dealing with in the increased workload/process changes so that every reply to an email notice.
Some things are just that - a notice. no reply necessary.
of course we won't even get into the whole - there's a phone number - ummmmm. you can call it?
FWIW, I don't so much mind the organisations with a single, short phone menu for the reason you mentioned. It's the ones where you spend several minutes going through several levels of menus, and then at the end they just cut you off (or to add insult to injury, refer you to their web site and then cut you off, when you were calling precisely because their web site was broken, incomplete or incorrect).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
In my opinion, if someone tried to reset your password on a service, there is absolutely nothing the site owner can do. I'm not sure how contacting them would resolve the issue.
I develop websites and management systems for a living. Having a user contact you over someone else trying to reset your password really is a situation that doesn't need an email reply from the user.
If you do reply, all you're going to get is a shrug and "There's nothing we can do about it. Maybr try changing your username, email address, or password."
I really fail to see how this type of notification woulf warrant a reply.
Yeah, this is a situation where while it might get sent out by the no-reply address, it should be simple enough to code the bot to have a reply-to address when it's sending out a "Contact us please" notice--I'd think that whom to contact would be one of the blanks in the form letter, really, so not only will the email go to the correct place when you click reply, but it'll be in the body of the email too, possibly with a phone number and hours if calling will be an option.
It generally isn't difficult to find the general contact information for a business--there's almost always a Contact Us page on their website, and you can find a link either in the header or footer of their home page, if not on every page. It's only particularly difficult to get this info if the company's a fly-by-night affair. (Now, finding the contact info for the people you actually need can be a bit of a trick, but usually you can go with something genetic in the basic area you need and if you guessed wrong they'll probably be able to direct you to where you need to be. I've done this song-and-dance when I had to deal with a company where my problem was I'd very much like to pay them but their site wouldn't let me.)
Unless... Multiple Personality Disorder.
No, you didn't. You're a compulsive liar and you should seek psychiatric help.
Uh, yea, the story was even here on Slashdot back in.. 2009 was it?
So you can go fuck yourself. :D
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.