customer service at Amazon.com: canned responses and stunning managerial incompetence
Full review
I have stopped purchasing anything from Amazon.com, as a matter of principle. Unfortunately, the ease of ordering and wide product selection offered by Amazon.com is vastly offset by their stunningly poor customer service in terms of responding to pre-purchase and post-purchase inquiries re billing and other issues. You can make a customer service inquiry by entering your phone number or by sending an email inquiry. Entering your phone number does result in a very quick call from customer service, but what you get is the typical mega-online customer service system whereby the customer service rep is clearly entering certain "key words" from the question you ask by typing them into their computer, and then responding to you by reading whatever pops up on their screen. The "canned" answers they then read to you are completely non-specific. Your subsequent attempts to narrow down the issue and get something close to an actual answer to your question result in the same repeated experience of a canned response, with the customer rep seemingly utterly oblivious to the nonsensical words they are robotically reading off their screen. The whole experience is truly surreal and so bizzarre that it borders on some sort of twilight zone or Alice in Wonderland acid trip. Contacting customer service by email results in the same canned responses, only in an email answer that takes a day or more to arrive. Replying to one of these canned emails with a request for a human being to answer your inquiry results in email response number 2, which is, "We are sorry our answer did not provide you the information you sought," etc. etc. Your jaw drops in stunned disbelief at the shortsightedness of the bizocrats that instituted such a system. I recently found myself in a legal education conference where Jeff Bezos was holding forth in the hallway during a break. I resisted the temptation to walk up and raise the topic with him because I knew that, however I might have tried to politely register a constructive complaint, I knew that the sarcastic tone I would be unable to resist descending into would probably result in me being dragged off by security for daring to criticize one of the web revolution's crown princes and his brilliant enterprise. I resigned myself to the slim satisfaction of cancelling my "Amazon prime" (one-click ordering) membership and now with this review of a very large, very depressing company.