We believe extremely strongly that if an organisation we are thinking of dealing with has or hasn’t got an ordinary email address we can use to seek information from them and, in particular, get help and support, that we already know a great deal about that organisation, for two main reasons.
Firstly, because ordinary email addresses are easily the most convenient means for us as consumers to seek information, help and support and so on from them – far more convenient than email forms, faxes and “snail mail” letters for instance.
Secondly, and far more importantly, it indicates that there may be people higher up in the organisations who who interested in how consumers dealing with their organisations are getting on – it’s so easy to just send them a copy of any responses you’ve got.
This, of course, particularly applies to anything you’ve got over the phone. While it can be argued that making phone calls is the easiest and most convenient way, if you think that what you’ve been told over the phone is not “up to scratch” in any way, and, in our experience this is often/mostly the case, without anything in writing, what can you do, and what can those further up in the organisation do.
Of course, it’s one thing having ordinary email addresses but another thing altogether for the organisations to provide helpful responses. You could get no better illustration of this than what we’ve set out in this post – Aldi not only doesn’t have any ordinary email addresses, they may as well have up in big red letters all over the place, WE JUST DON’T CARE.
Of course, with modern technology, it’s always possible to let organisations know how you’ve got on in dealing with them, and seek responses from them – it’s just that it involves much more work if they haven’t got ordinary email addresses. We’ve just spent lots of time working with one of our readers to put together an account of his atrocious experiences with Vodafone over the last few days, so it could be sent to them for their response – you can view this account by using this link.