Ordinary Nothing

I was discussion with Yahoo!’s customer support a problem causing my Yahoo! Messenger to be always marked as on-line from web pages and Yahoo! Groups. After a few days they managed to sort it out, and that was that.

Then I got an email asking me to take an on-line survey about their customer care. I took the survey. The survey was very badly designed, and had some serious flaws. They did provide an email address to send other comments about the survey, so I took the opportunity and emailed them (Satmetrix, which was running the survey for Yahoo!. I’m not sure why, Yahoo! are big enough to be able to make bad surveys by themselves. A good survey is something else, and may require previous practice, but this?) my main complaints.

First, They had a series of question of the rate between 1-5 the following aspects kind. One was for "Professionalism and courtesy of response". This is something I saw on several past surveys, and it always ticks me off. Courtesy and professionalism are two entirely different things when dealing with technical support. Courtesy is how nice and polite the person is. Professionalism is how much it seems like they have a clue what they’re talking about.

Yahoo! support emails are always very courteous. I dealt with them several times in the past, and I can’t fault their courtesy at all. But part of it is because they use pre-written responses, which were went over to assure they’re courteous. They are also usually entirely irrelevant. This specific incident was much better than previous ones, but still the level of professionalism was way below the level of courtesy.

So do I give a low mark, and risk them making the responses even more meaningless, yet friendly? Or do I give a high mark, and risk them thinking that quoting unhelpful pages, and telling me the problem was resolved when it wasn’t, is professional enough for me?

Second, they had a question about the "Time to receive a response after sending email to Yahoo!". This is again very unclear. I got a response straight away, but it was an automated response, copying the same help web page that didn’t help me a single bit originally (which is why I turned to support in the first place, after all). This response told me to reply to it if it wasn’t helpful, which I promptly did. The next reply, which is the first one I’d actually term a response, was fast, but took a little longer.

But which do they refer to here? Which do they call the first response? If I give a lower mark, would they think that they need to send the meaningless response even faster? If I give a high mark, would they think that the brain-dead automatic response was good?

Third, they had a field for free text commentary, but limited to "one" thing that Yahoo! Support needs to improve. Just one. This is silly, what if I have several comments? Heck, I did have several comments. But I didn’t say them, since they were asking for one.

Result? I was annoyed since I had things to say, I even took a survey which is supposed to let me say them, and then I wasn’t allowed to say them. And Yahoo! loses as well, since they got reviews from actual customers that they didn’t get. If this is the case with me, this is the case in aggregate. They lose valuable customer feedback, and annoy customers. Why?

So I sent my message. I wasn’t sure how much attention it would get, but I did my bit, and tried to help.

Guess what, I received a response. Is that a good thing? Well, considering the response, no! Satmetrix made themselves appear entirely unprofessional (and discourteous <g> ).

Of course the response was automated. That’s alright, I expected an automated response. But I expected one saying that the received my comments and will later review them, or something of the sort.

Anyone want to guess the method of automation used? An "Out of Office AutoReply". They just set the email address as a personal email address, with a setting used generally when someone is on vacation and want to notify people that they won’t be able to reply for a while.

Technically, it does the job, yes. But this is so unprofessional. It feels amateurish. It’s really not that difficult to send automatic replies that don’t look like that. When I get a response from a company after sending comments to an address they specified, I do not want to see the subject of the response message telling me that someone isn’t at the office. I sent it to an address meant to be a recipient of messages for further processing, not a personal one.

In addition, they had spam filters installed to monitor this address. How do I know? Because it added the word "[spam]" to the subject. You do not put automatic spam monitoring on an address set to autoreply to everything, or one meant to receive public comments. Yet they did.

So the spam filter thinks it’s spam, adds the word "[spam]" to the subject, and let the message go on.  Once past it, it gets caught be the Out of Office AutoReply mechanism, which replies to it with the pre-written text. And as a result I am told that they believe my message is spam. Good to know. That’s rude, people.

Either you don’t filter this address, or you don’t reply to messages you think are spam. But doing it like they really did it, bad, bad, bad.

All in all, if I had to fill a survey about my experience with Satmetrix, they would get very poor marks.

March 23rd, 2005 at 23:51 EET | Categories: Marketing | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.