Amazon toolbar BS

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Rikkitic

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#181182 5-Oct-2015 16:16

Apologies if the abbreviation crosses a line but I don't know what else to call it.

To be fair, this is not at all limited to Amazon, but that happens to be where I last encountered it and I was particularly incensed by the degree of transparent insincerity of it.

I sent a feedback to Amazon because they keep installing a link I don't want on my Chrome toolbar. No biggie, very much a First World problem, but after awhile it started to irritate. So I wrote them and asked them to stop spamming me with this unwelcome intrusion.

I just received their reply. It is the usual blah-blah boiler plate generic crap response that might be expected, but it was so obviously auto-generated that all it did was increase my irritation to actual anger. What it really says to me is 'we have so little regard for you as a customer and care so little what you think that we cannot even be bothered to read your complaint'. It actually felt a bit like a slap in the face. They must really think their customers are stupid. How insulting is that?

Here is the beginning of their response. It blathers on through a whole lexicon of carefully-crafted non-statements:

Hello,

I understand your disappointment regarding this. (I did not express disappointment. I told them to put their link you know where)

I've reported this feedback to the appropriate department in our concern to let them know about this and to make sure that this feedback is implemented in the near future and we make sure our website more user friendly as business and suggestion of every customer is very important to us and we always take customers feedback seriously.
(yeah, right, not even good English.)

It goes on in this vein. I have to wonder what they think they are trying to accomplish. All it did for me was make me angry. Fortunately they are plenty of other places where I can do my shopping. Now if I can just get rid of that stupid link.

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andrew027

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#1400929 6-Oct-2015 12:07

As your anger is more about the response you received than the toolbar link itself, here's some background...

That is an awful response. It's poorly worded and looks like it belongs in a scam or phishing email. That said, I used to work in customer service for an online retailer who shipped 95% of their product from Hong Kong and had their main office in the UK. When the UK staff were home in bed there were four of us here in New Zealand, working from home, accessing a shared inbox to respond to customer emails. We provided product spec.s, checked on order status, cancelled or resent items, processed refunds, etc. We were minnows swimming in Amazon's mighty river, but a lot of the same principles apply, particularly from the individual customer service agent's perspective.

1: Saving time. I started with a target of answering 15 emails an hour, increasing to 40/hour after four months. That's 1.5 minutes to read the email; work out what the customer is saying; go into our back-end system and find the order (difficult if they didn't provide the order number); determine what happened (not always what the customer said happened); decided what we were going to do about it; complete any action action to fix the problem; reply to the customer's email; and add a comment to the order to say what we had done. We had dozens of email templates covering almost everything that could go wrong and we'd customise these by copy/pasting details like customer name, order number, item ordered, product spec.s, etc. There is no way we could hit our targets without a lot of impersonal automation.

2: Buying time. 60% of our emails were "my order hasn't arrived" and at least 80% of those hadn't waited the full delivery time we specified on the site for their country. The first response was "Please wait the full XX days" followed by "sometimes items get delayed in the post - please wait a further two days". Almost every time the "palming off" worked and we wouldn't get another email from the customer (see #1).

3: Liability. Most companies avoid admitting fault. Sometimes we were told things like "there are 5000 orders that should have shipped last week but are still in the warehouse, so we're going to blame the Royal Mail strike - send this new reply for the next 10 days". This was one of the two main reasons that I stopped working for them in the end - I hated lying. In your case, it's not clear Amazon are even at fault so they won't apologise or admit liability for something that's not their problem.

4: Money. Amazon might not have installed the link in your browser but someone somewhere in Amazon knows there's an affiliate programme where people can direct business to their site. In this case, Amazon aren't going to be hugely motivated to stop that traffic as it's still business to them, and perhaps the best you can hope for is a pointer to which other product(s) you might have installed that are responsible for the link.

5: Authority. The customer service person may not be allowed to go off-message and send a non-standard reply. I certainly got in trouble for it a few times. It means you've probably spent more time on that email than you should have, coming up with/typing your own response (see #1) and if the customer comes back later with a follow-up question, nobody knows what you've said or done.

Does that make any of this right? No, but it happens in almost every customer service environment I've ever seen and I wouldn't be overly harsh on Amazon, particularly as it's probably not them that installed the link in the first place.

freitasm

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#1401321 6-Oct-2015 20:43

And here http://www.slimjet.com/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=249

I just started a virtual machine and installed this browser.

The "Shop at Amazon" button IS NOT INSTALLED BY AMAZON.

It's built-in into the browser, and available as one of the toolbar buttons - it's not downloaded from Amazon.

Actually when you click the button it redirects to Amazon with a tag=flashpcom-20 parameter. It's an affiliate link and the browser developers put in there. It also does the same with eBay and other online properties.

Basically you didn't want to give info to Google but didn't mind someone else doing something on your browsing.

The Amazon support person simply doesn't know what you were talking about and replied with a standard apologies message.

You should stop using this browser and get something else if you can't trust it.