Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Letter to customer support

Okay, so I emailed a famous auction site about an error that kept happening because the links on the page had one too many backslashes, and 2 days later I get this response (yes, I put the asterisks there myself, John didn't do that):

Hello,

Thank you for writing to ****. I'm John and I appreciate the opportunity
to assist you.

I am sorry that you are receiving the "Page not found" error when you
click on certain links in ****. I am glad to provide you all the
information in this regard.

Please understand that, these are intermittent browser specific errors
which are caused due to the old cache and cookies stored by your web
browser (e.g. Mozilla Firefox). Such errors will go away once you have
cleared these cache and cookies. You can clear these safely, without any
problems.

You may need to highlight the "entire" link and paste it into your
browser's address bar and hit "Enter" key on your keyboard or click "Go"
button next to the address bar.

To clear cache for the FireFox browser, please follow the steps below:

1. Go to Tools > Options.

2. Click Privacy in the menu on the left side of the Options window.

3. Click the "Clear" button located to the right of each option
(History, Cookies, Cache).

4. Click the "OK" button to close the Options window.

Alternatively, you can clear all information stored while browsing by
clicking Clear All. A confirmation dialog box will be shown before
clearing the information.

To clear cookies for the FireFox browser, please follow the steps below:

1. Click "Cookie Manager" from the Tools menu.

2. Click "Manage Stored Cookies."

3. Remove any cookie from the list, or remove all cookies.

If the problem still persists then, you can also contact our Live chat
support and get instant support from eBay representatives waiting to
help you in a Live Help setting. To contact our live help, please click
on the link below:

General Support (open 24 hours a day, seven days a week):

http://****.com/help/basics/n-livehelpemail.html

You can also find "live help" links all throughout the site such as on
the Sell Your Item form, on the upper right-hand corner of the ****.com
homepage, etc.

It is my pleasure to assist you. We are committed to making your
experiences at **** pleasant and rewarding. Thank you for being a
valuable member of our community.

Regards,

John Ma.
**** Customer Support

_____________________________________________


And let me just say that I was a little steamed that I got a canned response. So I wrote this email:
-----
John-
Thanks for writing back to me. I'm Julie and I'm happy to help you as well. Please allow me to offer you some feedback on your response to me!

I'm sorry you sent a canned response to my message. It confused me, as I went to great lengths to determine the problem and report it properly. And my cache has nothing to do with a link having too many backslashes. However, I can safely assume that:
1. You read my email OR
2. You (or someone else) read other peoples' emails reporting the same problem OR
3. The programmer that made the mistake corrected it before too many people noticed
BECAUSE the problem is now fixed. People can now safely browse the different pages for selling and then click the "sell" button at the top without getting an error message because some programmer put one too many backslashes there in the first place. I am certainly glad to have assisted you in fixing the website!

And I hope you noticed the sarcasm, because I was laying it on pretty thick.
~Julie
Give a person a fish and you have fed them for a day. Teach that person to use the internet and they won't bother you for weeks!
-----
So my question is, should I actually send it? Is it scathing enough? Should I scale back? Or should I just let it go?

I have decided I need a GPS thingamajig so I can join the sport of geocaching. It looks really fun, especially the bits about how not to get lost (see number 8 here)! LOL

I also need a new printer...here's a picture of mine....it's so old, they don't even sell it...but the "new and used" one is $119??? what the? I only paid fifty for mine, just for the record. And the refills are cheap. funny story about ink refills!! oh, wait, save that for another post...

No comments: