The trouble with big corp Internet services

Not for the first time I'm experiencing the frustration of dealing with those big corporation who run many of the Internet services we have all come to rely on. Most recently it was Google being unable to resolve problems with their Google Local service - the result was one lost customer, all because they couldn't make one five minute phone call. Instead they sent a whole stream of inane emails that never varied far from canned responses.

At the moment its Yahoo and a problem with switching a domain over to use one of their premium email services. We're up to five emails now and no sign yet of any intelligent life actually reading the emails being sent to them. Each one is cheerfully signed with names like "Carl", "Caitlin" or "Dorothy". Call me cynical (I am, I wont take offensive) but I think these names are as real as those used by strippers or porn stars. They might as well be "Helpful Harry" or "Caring Cindy".

My suspicion is the respondent is probably in a completely different country, paid to categorize each incoming email, pick a canned response and send it off. Somewhere someone decided that doing that a few times will winnow out the frivilous complaints to the point where only the most die-hard and irrate customers are left. At that point we stand a chance of getting someone to actually read the email and perhaps do something, but we haven't reached that point.

The most frustrating part is this is not some free Yahoo service - its actually something that was paid for, and instead of resolving this within a day we're now one week down the line and still no end in sight. This has resulted in one week without email after a change which should have at most resulted in a few hours of email server outage - something email systems are designed to handle. Unfortunately after three days most emails will be bounced back as undeliverable, we've long passed that point.

But my real point is this is typical of Internet services offered by really large companies with millions of customers. They apply (and probably have to) every economy of scale they can, and the result is you, the customer, become about as welcome as a piece of spam. Every input to them has to be analysed, filtered, and processed to the max. There just is no "pick up the phone and speak to someone" option left. For many we realize that getting someone on the phone is often just the beginning (like dealing with the phone company) but at least you have this tangible feeling that there really is a human out there who is dealing with your problem. Instead we are more often than not left to think we are just exchanging emails with nothing more than a glorified Eliza program.

Now what was it about machines that bothers you?^*