24
I hate automatic responders. They’re so impersonal and they more often than not don’t get the job done, but they just serve to confuse and anger.
Let me give you some examples:
Trying to contact Virgin Atlantic as a Flying Club member - if you email them from their website, it appears that your mail goes through a filter and based on the words you use, a standard response is sent back to you. So if you happen to mention claiming backdated miles, then you’ll get a pretty standard response along the lines of: “We understand you are trying to claim miles….”.
So what’s wrong with that? Well, nothing, I guess if that’s exactly what you want. In my email, I happened to mention the word “Miles” and I didn’t want to backdate any, but I still got the automated response.
Another one is Vonage. I recently had cause to ask if they knew why on certain occasions the US phone number that I call doesn’t work and tells me that the number is not in service (which I know is not the case). If I redial, it’s fine.
Along comes this automated response with lots of useful suggestions. Then it’s passed on to someone who picked up on a keyword and went and reset my Vonage router. I only asked if they knew why it does it. So then the customer agent has done something to my line. Aaagh! so I email them back (with hsitory) and ask them to undo whatever they’ve done. Guess what? It picked up on the keyword in my email and sent me an automated response with a thousand and one useless suggestions to cure a problem that I don’t have.
It’s one thing sending an automated response back when you’re out of the office, or to acknowledge receipt of an email or query (that’s good) - but I do wish that companies would stop taking emails and filtering them and reading them incorrectly. It’s a sure way to ensure that they get one back from me full of keywords that will confuse the crap out of their filters.