After a frustrating day of trying to communicate with several organisations it occurred to me that the power balance in the relationships has become so great the they have absolutely no interest in communication with their customers; email, and to a certain extent telephone calls have become a one way experience.
For each organisation I needed to discuss something with them that was not covered by the stupidly labelled FAQs, so I searched high and low on the web site for the contact details. Nowhere could I find an email address and rarely a phone number. Inevitably the phone number results in a call centre that has an unusually high level of calls so I wastes precious time sitting listening to terrible music interrupted by distorted disingenuous apologies for the delay in answering the call, which of course is very important to them.
When one does get through to a ‘customer service representative’ - a misnomer if ever I saw one - they are rarely able to do more than give the same response as the FAQs. When ones anger and frustration is increased even further by them not having the ability to provide any help whatsoever they take the opportunity to remind you that they have a zero tolerance policy to bad behaviour, and they will end the call if you exhibit any form of anger or frustration. If a caller should have the temerity not to be grateful for their ‘assistance’ in not solving the issue the ‘customer service representatives’ are instructed to use the ‘broken record’ strategy to wear you down until you give up.
Well I have a zero tolerance to bull-shit. If they devise a system where the only avenue for obtaining an answer is to provide a system that is designed not to provide answers what do they expect (that’s a rhetorical question by the way).
The next avenue is to email them, but there is no email address anywhere on the web site - search high and low and you won’t find one. The nearest you might get is a web form masquerading as email. Nine times out of ten this is just as helpful as the call centre. The response will be boilerplate text cobbled together by some automated system (I can not flatter it by calling it AI) that fails to address the points you made and suggests visiting the web site to read the FAQs.
To return to the point I was making; all these organisations insisted on obtaining my email address and phone number before they would do business. But its a one way relationship; effectively they can call and email me on my private number whenever they like for whatever reason they like, and send me reams of useless emails telling me how wonderful thier producs are, but I can not contact them. When they email, unless they really need to hear from me, it will be from a ’no-reply’ address.