From the CTIA newswire: "According to a Wall Street Journal report, many companies are asking customers to send emails rather than calling customer service. According to the Customer Respect Group, a consulting company that tests these systems, more than 25% of the emails consumers send are ignored altogether. The Wall Street Journal conducted a test of five various industries. According to the test, Cingular Wireless was by far the best, sending a detailed response within 27 minutes. (Source: Wall Street Journal)"
Proliferation of digital communication has had some interesting side effects. All of us have been guilty of pretending to not receive an email and ignore communications from some of our contacts, preferring them to others. With email inboxes being assaulted with large quantities of spam, it is curious that many companies add to their email traffic by switching from call centers to email processing centers. Granted, processing email is FAR cheaper than dealing with a call center and an irritated customer has time to cool off and can not ask to speak to the manager immediately. Of course, email can also be ignored and not answered. The same can not be said for a phone call. I've noticed that many company websites make it exceedingly difficult to find the phone number to call, pointing all communications to ubiquitous email addresses and "feedback" forms. Does this mean that companies now can skim off customer service as well, providing worse customer service at a fraction of the price?
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