I'm confused.
 

I emailed VM about why it looks like my 60meg upgrade is now delayed to perhaps December.

After five days, I get this reply:

Thanks for your email to Virgin Media Web Sales. As your query relates to your existing account we are unable to respond to your enquiry.

Have I emailed the wrong people?

Re: I'm confused.
 

They knoiw they are in the wrong, and its easier to escape with a canned answer via email. Phone them up instead.

Re: I'm confused.
 

^^^^what??

They are not in the wrong. He emailed sales, however it is customer service he should have contacted. So that's a perfectly acceptable response.

Re: I'm confused.
 

Well, a more acceptable approach would have been to have included the address of the customer service dept. in their reply or even to have forwarded it there. A polite but dead end bog-off letter is better than simply ignoring the email, granted, though I wouldn't go so far as to call it 'perfectly acceptable'.

Re: I'm confused.
 

Its called standardized responses a lot of companies use, imagine how many mail VM actually receive and if they had to write an email every time they had misdirected mail and not all customer needs an address for customer care.

Re: I'm confused.
 

True, my reply was hostile and unwarranted, I am just a little jaded with VM atm.

My apologies.

Re: I'm confused.
 

Jeez man. Haven't you heard of "doing right by the customer"? VM's ethos is clearly lacking here.

In my working life I'm on autopilot in such matters. Even to the extent of taking ownership until the customer has established proper contact.

---------- Post added at 13:41 ---------- Previous post was at 13:40 ----------

You had nothing to apologise for.

Re: I'm confused.
 

Do you think VM and most other big companies have time to write emails to every customer that contacts the wrong department. No, standard prewritten responses are the most used reply.

Re: I'm confused.
 

Sadly this is the ethos of many large corporations.:(

Re: I'm confused.
 

You clearly lack a sense of customer service culture.

At BT, for example, we were required to take ownership of a customer call until safely being handled by the right team.

Is it you that works for VM? One of the mods does.

Re: I'm confused.
 

An incorrectly routed email if in the KANA system can easily be rerouted but the person on the other end needs to be aware of how to reroute otherwise they will just use the standard reply as per this post, again it is still an acceptable response and a model many companies follow.

Also if an agent is just doing KANA emails they have targets to meet so may well just use the standard quick response.

---------- Post added at 15:42 ---------- Previous post was at 15:41 ----------

Now a phone call is something quite different and the is no reason not to reroute it if at all possible.

Re: I'm confused.
 

I drew no distinction, Peter. The culture was to take ownership. Customers should be revered. That culture seems to be missing at VM.

Re: I'm confused.
 

As I said if they are doing emails they will reroute if they know how or return with a standard email advising of the correct route as per every companies process and most companies work on similar lines nowadays.

You very rarely get a personal email back as otherwise some fool will post it online causing that bit of personalisation to be stopped by the company otherwise the is the potential to be inundated with multiple email requests that you do not have time to deal with or even to forward onwards as that would take up to much time when they have other work to be done.

Also most companies no longer have dedicated email teams so you can send in a request and if more information is required you can end up with emails from multiple agents all trying to deal with your issue, no company can afford to employ agents purely to deal with email so they are multiskilled and work that way.

Re: I'm confused.
 

I have to agree.

Re: I'm confused.
 

Unfortunately not the case with the OP however as he just got an email back saying that he shouldn't have contacted Sales - No info to say the his request had been passed to an appropriate team or that he should contact Team XYZ...

Not sure what you're getting at here but the gist of it is "Customer requests get in the way of real work" but surely, for a Customer Service department, the 'real work' is answering queries in an efficient and accurate manner rather than fobbing off with a standard respose that not only doesn't answer the point raised, but actually suggests that the valuable time the customer put in writing down their query was wasted as the CS staff have just ignored it!

From your earlier reply:

This just about sums up the contempt shown for Customer Service by many companies now - It's a numbers game. As long as you can show you've repied to X 100's of emails then you're doing your job. Where's the metrics that show whether the answer was helpful? Where's the metric that shows how many customers had to reply with a further message as their query wasn't answered first time round?

Sending a template reply is not "Customer Service"!!!