An advantage of a blog is getting the last word in when encountering ineffective customer service. Because of a music order in December, Amazon gave me a gift card for MP3 downloads. I hadn't bought MP3s before, but if it's free I can deal with it using players on my computer. It’s a chance to buy a bit of something in which I might not want the whole album. But what does Amazon have available? Not all albums are offered as downloads and not all of them offer tracks separately.
I thought of browsing through what is available. And that's where the trouble started. I clicked to browse classical music - by historical period - music of the 20th & 21st centuries. It proceeded to show me the 1st 24 albums -- out of 10,750. And out of those 24, 9 are for Christmas (which I think should be a separate category), one is Duke Ellington (not classical), and 4 are not 20th century -- meaning it is a hugely bloated list. But even if the list was only a couple thousand, showing only 24 at a time and not providing a way to skip around or subdivide the list it would take a long time to get through it.
I used their help form to suggest improvements and ask if there is a better way to browse. What I got was an email with instructions on how to search. Um, no.
The email contained a link for the case the question wasn't answered. I filled in the form -- and got two emails in response saying I hadn't used the email address they had on file. I can understand this is a security issue -- but neither response answered the question. If this is an issue why not request I login to make sure the reply goes to the address on file?
I logged in before responding to that. I repeated my previous complaints and added the one about not requiring me to login. The response was the stock answer about how to change which email address is on file. Bzzt. Wrong answer! This time they suggested I try their phone service -- enter your phone number and they'll call. And when they say Right Now they mean right now. I clicked "connect" and the phone rang.
Alas, the woman in India on the other end, once it was obvious there was nothing she could fix, could only apologize, assure me I'm a valued customer, and assure me that someone will be listening to the recording of the call and will consider my suggestions. Of course, I got one more auto response -- did she answer my question? Hard to tell.
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Generally, I like Amazon's service. However, that is probably due more to the fact that they are DRM free, unlike much of iTunes. Their database is horrid.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, I tried a service called Lala. Like Amazon, their service is DRM free. However, they seem to offer fewer albums/tracks/artists and their database is also horrid. I find a lot of errors in these services for artists and categories.