Dear Customer,
One of our Technical Support Specialists will be responding to your inquiry. It is our pleasure to be of service to you and thank you for choosing Hewlett-Packard, as your preferred vendor.
Imagine, HP does not want to hear from their customers, who, collectively, make their jobs and company possible. If you are going to do emarketing successfully, you will need to have a conversation, a dialog with your customers, not a rude monologue, where you inform the "dear customer" that you don't want them to reply to you.
Internet marketing requires a little more class than telling your customers that you are not interested in them Have you ever sent an email to a friend or relative and opened with "don't reply to me, I don't care to hear from you?" They may not be your friends for long if you do
Interactive marketing, is well, interactive. A "do not reply" message is rude.
Posted by: Darryl Mundo on Wednesday, September 3, 2008
It sounds to me like whoever wrote it never took Technical Writing. The key to a successful customer service (whether it's online on not) is to understand your customers. They are your bread and butter. Treat them as your allies not your enemies.
Posted by: Grant Swinbourne on Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Whilst I agree that this is a poor customer service experience, I think that it is fairly typical of what resource constrained companies are doing. Largely it is a factor of no permeating a customer service culture throughout every communication between the employee and the customer. Interestingly there are relatively low cost automated systems that can be deployed that can give the appearance of having started an interactive communication with the customer so that if they do replay to e-mails like this then the responses are handled by the system and not by an employee directly unless the response is such that the system determines that a human response is called for. My question is whether or not this actually improves customer service or in fact further alienates the customer from the serice provider. I'd be interested in hearing experiences from companies employing these systems...