The No-Reply Email Customer Service Runaround!

A common big company website problem is their general reluctance to engage in dialogue with their customers - whilst still doing the best and most polite job they can of appearing to care. Their no-reply, extra-polite, emails are an example, and Amazon.com are experts at this. You fill out a form, get their stock but unsatisfactory generic answer, are unable to reply to it to maintain any continuity, and then you have to go all round the same loop again.

I had an interesting variation on this today with Accors Hotels, the parent company of countless hotel chains. Having experience of dealing with their global customer services based somewhere in Africa, I seem to remember, I tried their contact form instead. Clearly there is no email address to use. Now the form specified an Attachment field as Mandatory, meaning you MUST use the field or else the form will not work. Surprise, surprise, I didn't need an attachment. But there was no way round it. So I created a little text document telling them how stupid it was to always demand an attachment, then I tried to attach that file. And guess what. It would NOT attach! So it was a Catch-22 situation. Attach a file if you want to send the form, but there is no way to attach the file.

How about that for an elegant solution to avoiding customer contact? It brings a whole new meaning to Trial and Error!