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I'm always skeptical of when companies say they will "never" do something. How in the world do all your employees know to never do that thing? Are you constantl
by mehrdadn 7y ago
I'm always skeptical of when companies say they will "never" do something. How in the world do all your employees know to never do that thing? Are you constantly reminding people every day in your office of the list of things to never do? Even if you're one person that's an insanely strong promise to make to anyone about your future actions. How does a company have such confidence in the future? The only way I can imagine this working is if they make it impossible for themselves to do that thing, which itself is practically impossible in these cases.
- im3w1l 7y agoI would assume that only certain employees are authorized to email customers at all, and they have been trained to follow the policies.
- mehrdadn 7y agoI mean, in theory, yes, but I mean, I'm sure you've seen your share of mishaps, right? Like when companies send "Dear $CUSTOMER..."? When something that blatantly obvious can get through, what confidence do you have that training is enough to prevent more subtle things like this for all eternity?
- im3w1l 7y agoI can't recall an instance of Dear $CUSTOMER sent to me personally. If it has happened it must have been very long ago.
- dmd 7y agoAmusingly enough, I got a Dear %{CUSTFIRSTNAME} from my auto loan provider less than an hour ago.
- tialaramex 7y agoThis isn't even restricted to email. I have a paper letter here from my dentist, the purpose of which is to explain that they've cancelled all routine appointments, because duh, of course they have. The letter addresses me as "Mr" in some places and as "MrNicholas" (no space) in other places. But to be fair it also claims the problem is COVID-9 (not COVID-19) so I'm guessing that correctness was not the number one focus of the person typing it.
- stormdennis 7y agoMail merge is mail merge, be it, to an email, letter or text. Dental practices aren't usually big enough to have a person who devotes such a large percentage of their time to composing mail merge templates as to become slick at the task. Rather than being sarcastic you would be better being grateful that they were courteous enough to go to the bother and expense of writing to you at a time when their business was experiencing complete shutdown and they themselves were facing total loss of income. They probably had more on their mind than pleasing pedants who'd focus on trivia at a time like this.
- tialaramex 7y agoDid it come across as sarcastic? I certainly didn't intend that, of course they have more important things to worry about. They'd usually come in to do a day's work and now suddenly everything is closed and they've got to write this weird open-ended letter. It's an NHS dentist, so unless we have millions of deaths I expect the practice will continue to exist and receive funding as before. Such practices are funded partially on the basis of the number of patients who are notionally "theirs" to look after and that hasn't changed even if providing non-emergency services is not a priority now.
- someoneiam 7y agoWe had some employees working from a coworking space last year, and we would receive invoices from The coworking biz addressed to "MR Company Name". They would frequently omit our VAT number as well. Of course, we could not pay those invoices, and whenever we got in contact with their support The response would be so delayed that we already had received multiple warnings and threats from their automatic invoicing system. They did eventually get their shit together and voided all The junk invoices they had sent us, but it took three months or so... And this was a huge player in coworking, not a small indie bussiness.