Customer Service Pet Peeve

Richard Hughes , Director of BroadVision, writes in the current issue of Insight, the eletter of Catalogue & eBusiness magazine, about one of my pet peeves:

Many websites send order confirmation emails from an address along the lines of do_not_reply@company.com. But why shouldn’t I reply? Surely if I have a query about an order, the easiest thing for me to do is to reply to the order confirmation. What’s more, it will have all the information that the customer service agent will need to process the enquiry – my name, email address, order number, date of purchase and a list of items purchased. Instead, the customer is often sent to the website to log in, find the relevant order and hope that the type of enquiry he want to make fits one of the predefined templates the site knows how to handle.