This week I’ve had frustration after frustration. I’ve had to contact a number of companies, but whether I do it by phone or email, or both, I’ve had problems. Contacting companies by email is tricky enough. First they are really keen to be sure you’ve read their frequently asked questions. Whenever I am contemplating the hassle of contacting a company, you can better I’ve already checked out their website or I am sure it is an unusual enquiry. Some of them force to you to go through pages of the stuff before giving in and letting you have a contact email or use a form. I prefer the email address to the form to be honest as that way I have a record of what I sent and when.
Then if you are lucky you get a reply. Nine times out of ten though that reply will be copy and pasted from the faqs or from some standard paragraphs that they have stored somewhere. This will never meet my needs (if it had I wouldn’t have sent the email in the first place). They will probably get a frustrated email back from me saying ‘ Have you read my email?’ and ‘please don’t send me a copy and paste response’, in fact it might save time if I put that in the initial request.
Either you exchange a load of emails, which often proves futile, or you take the plunge and ring up. Often this works better, but phone systems are frustrating beasts too. If you can guarantee getting through quickly it’s usually the best though. So often you are subjected to countless menus which may or not take you through to a person. If you do get to the queue for speaking to a real live human being, you then get a lot of guff about calls being recorded or have you checked our website or other nonsense. They seem reluctant to speak to you if they can possibly avoid it.
Generally I’ve found that when I do get through to people, the service improves and you can get the problem sorted out reasonably fast. The trouble is that it all eats time and effort that could be usefully used elsewhere.