No Humans Need Apply

You may know that I'm in charge of tech support where I work (otherwise known as a service desk or help desk) and we pride ourselves on spoiling our customers rotten. One aspect of this is our response time to emails. During "on shift" times we often answer within minutes. Many of our replies include some customization of a canned letter, or a fully customized reply if it's a one-off problem. I realize that not every tech support bureau operates this way, and I don't attempt to hold everyone to our high standards...but some things do make me cringe. Here's one of 'em.

In the middle of last week, the service provider for my personal email account had a catastrophic outage. Email was inaccessible for over 24 hours, and there were rumors that their corporate email even had an outage. Facebook and Twitter buddies of mine were posting frustrations about the outage. When the problem was fixed on Friday afternoon, I thought I'd be the atypical customer and send a quick note to their support portal to thank them for fixing it. I chuckled when I got the autoresponse email that said I'd receive an answer within three business days. I figured the rep who read it would be relieved that it wasn't a complaint, and would put a smile on his/her face.

Late last night (three business days plus about seven hours) I did receive a response from a rep named Pat. I could only tell it was Pat because his/her name was in parentheses in the From field. The message was a generic "we regret that you suffered an inconvenience" note, signed generically. So much for the personal touch. I might've received the same note if I'd written to say "you %$#%$# have held my email messages hostage for the past 24 hours you &%@&%@" or something similar. No customization and certainly no personalization. Does their software not allow for this? Or are they completely not motivated to respond to a "thanks" and a smiley face any differently than they would a complaint?

Definitely a case where I would not say "vive la difference."