| > At time of writing, B&Q’s contact form just plainly doesn’t work1. I am fairly amazed that a retailer with revenues in the billions doesn’t notice written queries have stopped coming in. I've noticed customer service forms on brand Web sites are often broken, most commonly by some Web backend error at submission time, but there are other ways, too. For some brands, a broken contact form may be incompetence or corporate dysfunction. But for some of them, it could be a a lazy dark pattern, to reduce customer support costs. (Dark pattern similar to how, when waiting in a holding pattern for telephone customer service, they barge in every 30 seconds, to jolt you into thinking they might be picking up, but then blare, "Your call is important to us! Please remain on hold, and the next available customer service representative will assist you." I assume they know they're making the on-hold experience so much worse.) Of the forms that do work, I'd say at least half the time they trigger an automated email response to call customer service on the telephone. The exact thing you were trying to avoid by opting for a Web form, where you could avoid telephone hell, and also concisely capture the pertinent information in a way that wouldn't get garbled by a CSR (or later by a manager trying to hide a problem). When I have gotten a non-automated email response, it's often someone ignoring the message and latching onto a keyword to send a boilerplate response. Maybe that's good for a poorly treated CSR's metrics, and maybe it also suits someone else's metrics/KPIs/OKRs. Or it's an entirely new boilerplate form, to be done in email, since apparently they asked the wrong things in their Web form. Maybe that one is mostly just ordinary corporate dysfunction, and it also ends up working for some people. Separately, for companies that provide a contact email address... there's the email bounce messages, when the contact address was an email alias that forwards to someone no longer there. Clearly, making sure customer service is covered is When I'm contacting a company, it's usually about a problem they should want to know about, such as if they care about safety. Though I assume that's not the majority of the kinds of complaints they hear. I have sympathy for anyone doing support for large numbers of retail customers/users, but if you chose to do a business that involves that, you can't be disingenuous or negligent about it. |