[connortomas]

Well, yeah, noreply emails are useful for the business, and I understand that. They're not very useful for the customer, though.

Customers want to feel as though there's a real person they can contact directly. They don't want to feel as though they'll simply be shunted endlessly from department from department. My opinion is that the customer shouldn't need to learn how your company is structured simply to make a one-off complaint or ask a question. The onus should be on the company to receive the support query and then pass it along to somebody who can answer it.

I'm aware this a less obviously scaleable approach to support. For some companies, it's not really tenable. In many cases, the value of a single customer may be so low that providing good support isn't worth it... it may be more valuable to simply ignore that customer until they leave. But for companies in which every customer is valuable, or could be valuable (Mailchimp, for example, or Zendesk), this kind of "inefficient" customer-centric support makes sense.