Hotmail Closure
Advice - The Story
Hotmail is not closing.
After receiving one forward too many stating that MSN Hotmail was about to close down due to a lack of resources I had had enough. I am not even a Hotmail user. I just happen to know many people who are, and hence I am often included on the lists of people to which these emails are sent. I have written about this before, and include some examples on the blog (link). I wanted to reply to the people sending with a quote from a Hotmail help article saying "we do not send forwards", but the help section didn't seem to cover the topic. So I decided to get in touch with Hotmail Support to request a help article. Finding their contact details was not particularly easy, but I got them and sent of the form with this message.
I am currently not a Hotmail User. However I am friends with many people that are and subsequently I get a lot of messages from Hotmail users. I notice than some of these messages are forwards and take roughly the following format:
* Warning! You will have to pay for your hotmail account on 1st October unless you forward this message to 18 of your MSN Passport contacts in the next 24 hours.
People believe this. And they forward it. I wanted to convince a friend of mine that it is not the case that Hotmail would ever need to send messages around via forwards, and that if Hotmail ever needed to contact anyone they could do it easily as they have everyones email addresses. These emails after all often have hundreds of email addresses on and if they fell into a spammers hands could cause problems.
So I searched your help files and couldn't find a clear statement on the subject. I am therefore requesting that you add an entry to your help about these emails and stress that they are *a* not real and *b* not to be forwarded. It may even be worth adding a link to the hotmail main page to the article like some banks have about fraudalent email circulation.
I for one would like to see this issue resolved. I have saved a copy of this message and I expect a full response from you in the near future.
Many thanks,
Sam Davyson.
I send this on Saturday 4th March 2006, and I was delighted to get a response just a few days later on Monday:
Dear Sam,
Thank you for writing to MSN Hotmail Technical Support.
My name is Christopher and from what I have read, you are inquiring on the creation of a Help topic regarding the chain letter you received.
I realize that this may create much convenience on your part. I also understand how important it is to verify such request.
Sam, I understand the convenience if this request can be granted and this is why I am going to submit this to our Hotmail Product Development Team as a feature request for future site improvement and upgrade.
While I cannot provide specific details on when this will be included in the Hotmail service, rest assured that we review and evaluate feature requests regularly in order to provide our users with the best e-mail experience possible.
Moving forward, the letter you stated was a chain letter. Chain letters are e-mail messages that are sent from person to person, often spreading misinformation and growing in size.
It is very likely that everything in this letter is false.
The security and privacy of your MSN Hotmail account are very important to us. If the chain letter you received came from an @hotmail.com address and you would like us to take action against the sender of this message, please reply with full header information.
If you need instructions on how to expose your Full message header, please contact the technical support team of the email program you are using.
Thank you for reporting your concern to us. If you have any inquiries, please do not hesitate to write back to us.
Sincerely,
Christopher A.
MSN Hotmail Technical Support
A very satisfactory response? Yeah I thought so. There were some bits where it doesn't quite make sense which made me wonder how much of a template was being used. But it is still a good response, and the article was put forward to the development team. I didn't know why it was being classed as a "feature request" though. It is a help article for heavens sake! I wrote back, being nice at first, but then getting to the point:
Dear Christopher A,
Thank you very much for your prompt response. It is a delight to see such an active and friendly technical support team. That is such a rare thing to find on the internet.
I am very pleased to see that you have submitted my request for further review and that it could be added to the system in the future. I am not particularly pleased with the nature of the processing that you detail, as to me when only 1 extra article is being requested to be added to the help section this process should be efficient and take an extremely short period of time. However I am very pleased to see that it is under consideration.
In the intervening time I imagine that I will continue to receive these chain emails that threaten account closure of Hotmail and MSN accounts. I do not wish you to take action against the people that send them to me as after all their email provider does not provide the support material to indicate that these emails are completely false.
I will keep each of the emails that I am forwarded that discuss the closure of Hotmail accounts and periodically check the Hotmail help material. Each month or so I will send you a sample of the emails I have received so that you know that the issue that I originally raised is still a problem. Once the help is updated I will cease to send these messages to you.
If you could let me know when the help article is question goes live, or when it is rejected as a proposal I would be very grateful.
Thank you very much,
Sam Davyson.
As you can see I also kindly suggested that I could forward all the emails that were forwards saying that Hotmail was going to close to the Hotmail staff until the help article was put in place. I also asked to be told when the article went live. The response came on March 7th:
Dear Sam,
Thank you for writing back to MSN Hotmail Technical Support.
My name is Christian and I have read your previous correspondence about a feature request to create a Help topic regarding chain letters you have been receiving. I know how important this will be for you.
I have checked with our Hotmail Product Development Team and Christopher already submitted this item for review. I would like to impart that Hotmail Product Development Team might consider this item for future releases.
We appreciate your suggestion. We are constantly making efforts to further enhance our service and your feedback is very useful to us in this process. Please continue sending your feedback or suggestions by clicking on the "Feedback" link located at the lower right part of your Hotmail account.
I appreciate your continued support. If there are things you wish to clarify or you have other concerns, please do not hesitate to write back anytime and we will be more than willing to extend our service.
Sincerely,
Christian M.
At this point I started to wonder how much of my email this member of staff had read. For a start I was getting a response from a different staff member, this is obviously inefficient but understandably sometimes unavoidable. But he says he has read up on my previous messages although it seems he missed the first line where I stated that I wasn't a Hotmail user, and that he missed the whole subject of my last message.
Dear Christain M,
Thank you very much for your prompt response. As ever warm, friendly and fast. I have been really impressed with the way that the Hotmail Support team has handled my request since I submitted it such a short time ago.
It appears to me however that you have not carefully read my previous message. I clearly stated on my last message (to which you have just replied):
"If you could let me know when the help article is question goes live, or when it is rejected as a proposal I would be very grateful."
You then specify in your response:
"If there are things you wish to clarify or you have other concerns, please do not hesitate to write back anytime and we will be more than willing to extend our service."
So yes, there is one more thing. I would like to be notified when the help article goes live on your website or when you review and reject the proposal. This would be very useful to me as it would save me having to make special visits to continually check the Hotmail Help topics, as Hotmail is not a service that I myself use. You will find an explanation of why I am therefore contacting you in the first email that I sent.
So to clarify: Can you please confirm that I will be notified when you have decided about this feature request?
Thank you very much,
Sam Davyson.
I didn't think they would say yes to this request. Asking to be notified of when the article goes live is a little cheeky but understandable I think given I don't use the service they provide. Notice so far I have sent 3 emails, and got 2 back, and so far I have not even got a solid quotation that says we don't send forwards. Christopher A came close but he wasn't definite.
Hello Sam,
Thank you for writing back to MSN Hotmail Technical Support.
This is Christian and I am responding to your inquiry on when your proposed article will be added in the Help topic links.
You are valuable at MSN and we look forward to providing you with consistent and effective service.
If you have other inquiries, please do not hesitate to write back.
Sincerely,
Christian N.
MSN Hotmail Technical Support
Wow! The same person wrote back! No they didn't. This is now Christian N, not Christian M from email 2. So three emails and three different support representatives, all of them reading all of the messages in the exchange. Obviously they didn't pay too much attention as this member of staff also missed the fact that I am not a customer. But there you go, it is an easy mistake to make. And he will let me know when it will be live, that is excellent. I left it a few days. And then I got another forward.
Christian,
I am writing to inform you that I have just received another forward message that indicates that Hotmail is about to start charging for accounts. As we have discussed in the past I get these quite often (despite not being a Hotmail user) and I am aware that they are broadly speaking totally bogus.
This is the message that I just got:
>Hey it is Andy and john the directors of MSN, sorry for the
>interruption but msn is closing down.
>this is because too many inconsiderate
>people are
>taking up all the name (eg making up lots of different accounts
>for
>just one
>person), we only have 578 names left. If you would like to close
>your
>account, DO NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE ON. If you would like to keep
>your
>account, then SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT
>LIST. This
>is no
>joke, we will be shutting down the servers. Send it on, thanks.
>WHO EVER DOES NOT SEND THIS MESSEAGE, YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE
>CLOSED AND
>YOU
>WILL COST £10.00 A MONTH TO USE. SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR
>CONTACT
>LIST.
>NOW YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO. PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS or REPLAY.
>COPY THE
>WHOLE EMAIL. GO BACK TO YOUR INBOX AND CLICK ON NEW. AND PASTE
>THANK
>YOU FOR
>YOUR ATTENTION
I requested on the 4th of March that you provide a help article to guide Hotmail users that these articles are not true and they do not have to worry about their account closing. I suggested that the article should point out that if Hotmail users needed to be contacted they could easily be done so as Hotmail provides the email addresses and hence obviously has a database with them in. It would never be necessary for service changing announcements to be sent by forwards. I pointed out that this is a matter of privacy. These forwarded emails gather lots of addresses very fast as Hotmail users believe them (after all there is no help article to advise them otherwise) and if they fall into the hands of a spammer this can result in unwanted messages.
I also asked for me to be contacted personally when the help article which I have requested goes live. This was granted by you in our previous exchange.
15 days have passed since my original request. In that time I have received the one notice that I have copy and pasted above. I have not been emailed by you to say the help article is live and I will therefore presume it is not.
Why is it not? A webpage such as the one I am requesting would take a maximum of 30 minutes to write and publish. What issue is more important to you that your user's privacy?
I am writing to remind you that ask you read this more emails are being forwarded by unenlightened Hotmail users who think they are saving their accounts. You need to get the article written as soon as possible in order to avoid this issue.
I have kept a copy of this message, along with the date and time it was sent. I expect a full response shortly. If you have any problems with the requests above I ask that you pass on to me details of how I contact the person working in Hotmail support who is immediately your senior.
Thank you for your time,
Sam Davyson.
So I sent that on March 19th. And just two days later I got a response. And this email finally gave me the quotation that I wanted. I have highlighted the significant bit below in bold text.
Hello Sam,
Thank you for writing back to MSN Hotmail Technical Support.
This is Anna Marie and I am responding to your concern about the questionable e-mail you received stating that Hotmail will charge its members for using its service.
I understand how important it is for you to have your concern addressed immediately. I sincerely apologize if we were unable to respond to you sooner.
Sam, the e-mail you received was a chain letter. Please be assured that it is a hoax and has not been sent from Hotmail. The security and privacy of your Hotmail account are very important to us. Please keep the following rules in mind when receiving and responding to mail that seems to come from Hotmail:
- Hotmail does not forward messages to you (example: "From" line contains "FW").
- Hotmail never sends you chain letters.
It is unfortunate that some people go to these lengths to create confusion and we request you simply delete any such fraudulent message and disregard its contents.
Microsoft has no control over e-mail messages or Web sites that imitate company trademarks, logos, or copyrighted materials. The sources of hoax e-mail and fake Web sites will try to encourage people to divulge personal information willingly. This information is frequently used maliciously or fraudulently. We are proactively investigating reports of e-mail and Web sites that imitate Microsoft.
If you have other concerns and inquiries, please feel free to write back.
Sincerely,
Anna Marie O.
MSN Hotmail Technical Support
I have since used the quotation from this email on my page about this matter (link). Note though that she simply requests that I delete the emails that are causing the problem. She doesn't even mention the fact I am requesting a help article on the subject. Maybe she missed that bit out when she read through the previous emails. Fourth email and the fourth staff member. Notice also this is the fourth time I have been invited to write back if I have any further queries. And I did have more queries: Why isn't the article live now? Why did you uignore my message? etc.
In the next email I made a slight error. I said "three reprensentatives" when it was really four, I got the Christian's mixed up! But even so. The meaning still stands. I sent this on March 21st:
Dear Anna Marie,
This is now the fifth message that I have written to Hotmail customer support. As I mentioned in my earlier emails I was very impressed with the level of service. I am also impressed with the speed at which you responded. But you do not address my concern.
You are the first representative to clearly state the rules regarding that Hotmail will never send chain mails or forward messages from user to user. Thank you for this. That is exactly what I wanted. I don't though want anyone else to have to exchange so many emails to find out that fact. As I originally requested I would like you to list those facts somewhere (preferably somewhere findable) in the Hotmail help section.
This will allow users of the Hotmail service to learn that these messages are not true from the support material that is provided. At the moment there is no such information in the Hotmail help.
In response to my first message I was told that the suggestion that I made for the product would be put forward. In the second this was confirmed. Later I asked for me to be notified when the help article went live. This was agreed. I am yet to receive notification and I therefore assume that the article has not been written.
It is now the 21st of March. I sent my first email on the 4th of March. In this time I have received two of these chain mails. I have pointed out the dangers of these in my previous emails. I can not understadnd why after several weeks the article is not live. You say that privacy and security are important to you -- well the evidence provided so far has shown no signs of that.
I remind you that I am saving copies of all of these messages and I expect a full response (and a live help article on the mentioned subject) very soon.
I ask this time that you refer me to the member of staff immediately your senior. After dealing with three seperate Hotmail representatives with no visible effect, now I would like some action.
Many thanks,
Sam Davyson.
I requested to get someone more senior. Did I get it? I am not sure. The person who responded (who was a fifth new member of staff) did break further from the model answer than the previous emails. An extra apologetic introduction is added before the "I have read your email exchange" line. That is nice. Like everyone else this person ignored the fact I am not a customer. Vitally though there was one huge difference:
Hello Sam,
Thank you for writing back to MSN Hotmail Technical Support.
Before anything else, I would like to apologize for the delay in responding to your message. Every message that Hotmail receives is very important. Unfortunately, we recently received an extremely high volume of e-mail messages and are working diligently to catch up.
This is Christina and I have read your e-mail exchange with the previous support representatives about your proposed article will be added in the Help topic links.
I know how important this can be for you.
Sam, we may not be able to commit in providing you an exact date when this article will be added in the Help topic links, I would like you to know that our team are working round the clock to have this article to be added in an acceptable time frame.
Your e-mail is extremely important to us and as a valued customer, we would like to provide you the best e-mail experience possible using our service. Hotmail is continually looking for ways to improve our service. We strive to make positive changes to our product, based on feedback we receive from our customers.
I appreciate your understanding and patience.
Sincerely,
Christina S.
Notice it? There is no "please write back". They are trying to stop me emailing! I thought I better email back straight away but unfortunately I couldn't really compose anything that sounded reasonable enough. I was laughing a fair bit at the thought of a whole team of Hotmail staff working "around the clock" to write a help article. The reply above arrived on March 22nd, so we were getting on for a month since my original request. And I didn't really feel like the help article was any closer. Yes they had promised to make it, and yes they had promised to email me when it was made. But it had not been made. That is when I decided to pull this site together. I thought I could write the help article for them and then they would have no excuse for it taking so long.
It did take me a while to getting roung to doing this, and initially I designed it to look exactly like Hotmail Help but I thought this might actually confuse people, hence the big banners on the advice page warning people that this is not an official message from Hotmail. So on March 28th with this site live I emailed them back:
Christina,
I understand that production of an article may take time. But the length of time so far taken that is from the 4th March until the present day (almost 1 month) is quite unacceptable in my view. It might be a busy time for you though so I thought I would try to help you out a little.
I have therefore written, formatted, and published (and am now hosting) and article which explains that Hotmail do not send emails by forwards. Obviously I don't expect you to use it on your site (certainly not in its current state) but it might give you some ideas into how to make your page to explain it.
The address is:
http://sam.davyson.com/hotmail
I am also publishing my experience with MSN Hotmail Support. It has not been altogether brilliant and since this is the sixth message I am writing and there is still no article up I am not too pleased. I will say that I have always been happy with the speed of response, but not always the content. You will find full records of the emails sent a received in this quest for the help article at:
http://sam.davyson.com/hotmail/story
As always I would really like the help article to be up when you email me next. But status reports would be nice as long as they are honest. Like the porject has yet to be started.
As a makeshift solution you may want to link to my article from the Hotmail help, or alternatively speed up your creation process.
Thank you very much,
Sam Davyson.
I got a response early in the morning on March 30th, and I have to say it is the worse email that I have got so far. There is nothing that really relates to my message to them. No reference to this website, no reference to my help article. This is what I was sent:
Hello Sam,
Thank you for writing back to MSN Hotmail Technical Support.
Before I address your issue, please accept my apologies for the delayed response. We normally respond within 24 hours, but we have received an unusually large number of messages recently.
I am Vendrelli and I have read your correspondence with my colleagues about your proposed article. I understand how important it is to have your concern addressed immediately.
Sam, I appreciate your taking the time to send us your feedback about MSN Hotmail, and for your feature suggestions of any new features that you think are important to add to MSN Hotmail. We take feedback about MSN Hotmail and our customer service very seriously, and we review feedback on an o
ngoing basis. If you have any additional suggestions for new features that you would like to be added to MSN Hotmail, click "Feedback" on the bottom right of our pages.
Your effort in submitting this concern is highly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Vendrelli R.
MSN Hotmail Technical Support
Once again, no write back request. I guess this will become the normal state of things from now on. We are twelve messages in (6 from me, 6 from them) and they are getting irritated it seems. But instead of doing as I requested the responses are getting worse. This representative is of course new to me and they also seem to be classing my request as a "feature request". I immediately wrote back with one of my longer emails:
Vendrelli R,
Thanks [f]or your reply. I however feel nomore satisfied than I did with the previous message. I simply cannot understand why one of the biggest companies in the world has a customer service team for one of its products that is such that it takes a month for a simple help article to be written and published.
Collegues of yours have already acknowledged that it is an important issue, and that it is worth putting forward as a suggestion for the future. The very first member of staff did this for me. This was confirmed by the second. Unfortunately you seem to be classing it as a "feature request" which is a total misnomer. I am not requesting anything extravagant. I am not requesting a new feature. Just one page of text from Hotmail that sets the record straight on this issue is all I want.
I have highlighted the huge privacy risks that result from the spreading of email messages such as the one that I have described. These emails can find there way into the hands of spammers which can results in a large quantity of unwanted mail. You leaving this issue without a help article doesn't really agree with your Anti Spam Policy.
So, lets get this straight. I am not a Hotmail user. I take time out of my life to write you at Hotmail. The first few times it is great. Nothing is done, but these things take time. Then nothing is done with this issue. I write more. I get more responses that are plain, often seemingly automated, never from the same member of staff and often written with little or no regard for the contents of my message. But I don't give in. I want this article to go live, I have many friends using the Hotmail network. I ask twice to be referred to someone more senior. There is no evidence that either time I am. I write my latest email to you, I write you an article that you could use. I format it, I publish it and I continue to host it. This is not given a mention in your reponse. This is my seventh email.
So now it is the 28th of March. I wrote in on the 4th. In 24 days you have not found the time to write one article. As I have already pointed out this indicates a very serious disregard for your users privacy. If you read the article I produced I show that it is actually already against Hotmail rules to forward the messages all you need to do is to clearly cite these rules in a help article.
I don't want an automated response. I have got plenty already. I want you to make the article. You say you take feedback on your customer service very seriously. Well I hope that you are taking in all the information that I am providing you with here. It should allow yo to improve performance in the future.
I am not going to stop writing. I keep getting the messages that say that Hotmail is going to close via forwards. You have confirmed that these are not true but for some reason you don't seem willing to tell the rest of the world this. You have to write in to Hotmail five times to get to this information. So just to repeat: don't send an automated response. If that is all you have got then don't send anything at all. Work on the help article, you will find a link to my attempt in the email above.
It has already been agreed that I will be notified when the help article goes live, I have also requested honest progress updates but it seems that these are not really going to happen. That is ok. Get the help article done and I will be happy.
Thank you very much,
Sam Davyson.
I wonder if they will still send an automated response, even though I specifically request for them not too. I also wonder how long a response will take. Message 6 from them said they normally take 24 hours to respond to emails. I thought I would check on this. See how many messages to me obey the 24 hour rule. Apparently most messages are answered within 24 hours, but...
Message 1: 44 hours
Message 2: 19 hours
Message 3: 22 hours
Message 4: 33 hours
Message 5: 26 hours
Message 6: 27 hours
That is right. 2/6 so far for promptness by a limit set by the MSN Hotmail Technical Support team. I will see if I get enough messages to make it statistically significantly less than 24 hours. I will need a few more late ones for that I think. I await the next response.
Just to update - the current status for message 7 looks like this:
Message 7: 159 hours
We are getting close to a week since I emailed them, and still no word. So I thought perhaps I should email them again.
Vendrelli R,
Today marks one week since I last wrote to you. This is significantly above the 24 hour limit in which you aim to answer emails. By my calculations so far 2/7 emails that you have set me have been within 24 hours (and that assumes that I will eventually get a response for email number 7). For the first time I am writing before I have received a response from the team. This is because I am not sure if I am ever going to get one. I don't want to waste your time. We both know about the issues that I am writing about. I am just reminding you that this remains unfixed.
If you provide me with an email address I also have lots of feedback about my experience with the customer service team. I would love for you to learn from what I have had to deal with and not make the same errors again. As I say if you pass me an address I will willing send you some information.
Thanks very much,
Sam Davyson.
No response so far. So on 25th of April I write again:
Vendrelli R,
I originally got in touch on the 4th March 2006. Now here we are coming to the end of April nearly 8 weeks later on. And still the issue that I raised has not been resolved. This is email number nine. Not only that but at this moment I have sent two emails to you to which you have not replied, and if this doesn't get a response this will be the third. Perhaps in a busy company emails go astray, in which case just be in touch and I will gladly resend both messages.
I expressed earlier in a message that I was dissatisfied with the nature of the automated responses that I was getting. My emails were completely disregarded, often points that I had clearly outlined were missed by respresentatives. One such point is the fact that I am not a Hotmail user which several of the team ignored, and proceeded to give me instructions about operations from within Hotmail. The issue of why I am contacting you if I am not a Hotmail user is discussed in the first email I sent, and several of the subsequent ones too.
But an automated response (or near automated) was at least a response. Now I have got nothing back at all from two emails dated Mar 30th and Apr 6th. I can't understand why I am still waiting.
I have requested the addition of one help article. One article. Probably less than 300 words. The very first respresentative agreed that it was a good idea and put it forward for a possibility. But still coming up to 2 months later nothing has been done. I have offered to write the article for you, (and have actually written it and shown you it in a previous email) to help you save time. Yet this didn't even get a comment in the reply.
The issue that I have raised is a serious privacy concern. And it is already outlined in your Terms of Service / Anti Spam policy. Why wont you make this point clear in your help pages?
I am currently advising many of my friends who are Hotmail users that they should consider their options when using the service. As my exchanges with you have clearly demonstrated in your organisation the response time for user feedback is slow and user privacy is not thought to be an important enough issue to issue a new help article once in 2 months.
I will be in touch again, from now on I will be writing weekly on a Tuesday evening whether I have a response from you or not. In the case that you do reply I will write back earlier. I remind you that I am keeping a record of all my messages to you and all of your responses.
Yours,
Sam Davyson.
But I got no response so on the next Tuesday evening I quickly wrote this message this is now:02/05/06. As close as you like to 2 months after my first request.
Vendrelli R,
I realise that my situation is not improving. I am now writing my tenth email to you. The last three of them have received no response at all. I am not willing to explain the points again if there is no indication that my emails are even being read.
I will take out a new support ticket next week. Maybe then I will get a response.
Sam Davyson.
However, before "next week" came I got a response. It came on the 5th May and read:
Hello Sam,
Thank you for writing back to MSN Hotmail Technical Support.
This is Jimmy and I have read over your e-mail exchange with my colleagues. I am writing in response to your proposed article about a hoax e-mail regarding MSN Hotmail.
I know how important it is to have your concern attended to at the soonest possible time. Please accept my apologies for the delay and for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
We at Hotmail are very aware of the growing problem of spam and hoax e-mail.
MSN has been very aggressive and proactive in protecting our more than 170 million users from spam and hoax e-mail. We prevent more than 2 billion messages a day from reaching the inboxes of our users. We protect our users on many levels, from the server to the client.
AS for your propose article, I will submit this item to our development team as a feature request. We regularly review customer comments and feature requests and use them to plan new Hotmail improvements.
You are a valuable customer to MSN and we are glad to give you consistent and effective service.
Thank you for using MSN Hotmail.
Sincerely,
Jimmy B.
MSN Hotmail Technical Support
If you have only just joined the story then you may think that this response is fair enough. It is a whole month since I got a response so I was glad to get anything. But going through it carefully it is so rubbish. And I explained why to them in my reply:
Jimmy B,
Thank you very much for replying to my message. I can only wonder what happened to my three other messages to you since you last wrote but that is not too much of a problem -- at least now you have been back in touch. The fact that this is about 30 times later than your apparent target of a 24 hour turn around which Vendrelli R claimed you "normally" reach (Email Mar 30th) is an irritation of course but I think it is probably more important for you to think about this information and use it to improve your customer service.
In terms of what you said in your message back to me which I have waited for over a month to receive I am totally dissatisfied. Here is why. You start by saying that you have read over the previous emails with the representatives -- this is good to hear. However at the end of the email you thank me for using Hotmail and say that I am a valuable customer. I do not use Hotmail. Let me repeat: I do not use Hotmail. If you had read the previous discussion then you would have seen that I stated this particular point four times before on March 4th, 19th, 30th and April 25th. If you have inadvertently lost any emails I will gladly send you copies or you can read them in the quoted text that follows this email.
Ok. That is perhaps a minor quibble that highlights that you didn't read the contents of my messages with the care that your message might suggest. You then go on to say this:
MSN has been very aggressive and proactive in protecting our more than 170 million users from spam and hoax e-mail. We prevent more than 2 billion messages a day from reaching the inboxes of our users. We protect our users on many levels, from the server to the client.
What is this an advertisement? Why on earth are you telling me how many customers you have? Why would I care how many messages arecaught each day by your systems? What is the relevance of any of this to me? Perhaps if I was a Hotmail user I might find this in some way reassuring, but even then I think I would feel that it was perhaps a little too irrelevant to the matter in hand. Maybe you have this paragraph in your template for responding to requests to your customer service team.
The next paragraph is really what irritated me about the customer service though. It reads:
AS for your propose article, I will submit this item to our development team as a feature request. We regularly review customer comments and feature requests and use them to plan new Hotmail improvements.
Christopher said on March 6th:
Sam, I understand the convenience if this request can be granted and this is why I am going to submit this to our Hotmail Product Development Team as a feature request for future site improvement and upgrade.
And the Christain M said in the next email on March 7th:
I have checked with our Hotmail Product Development Team and Christopher already submitted this item for review. I would like to impart that Hotmail Product Development Team might consider this item for future releases.
Christina said:
This is Christina and I have read your e-mail exchange with the previous support representatives about your proposed article will be added in the Help topic links.
Although the sentence here doesn't actually make any sense I think it suggests that the article will be added to the help section (that is certainly the implication of its context).
And now, over 2 months since my first email, you decide to tell me that you are going to submit my suggestion to Hotmail product development as a feature request. It has already been submitted. Has it been deleted from your system? Did you get round to reviewing it and decide that it was not worth your whilse in implementing it?
If it has fallen out of your system for this reason then I wonder why I have not been informed. I agreed with Christian N on March 8th that I was to be informed of when a decision was reached. He said:
Yes, we will gladly inform you when your proposal will be added to the Help topic links.
So I am left very confused. What is going on in your support team? Christina tells me you are working around the clock to address issues. I have asked repeatedly to be passed on to a more senior member of staff. This request has never been commented on. I have created the help article for you (and published it) to save you time but this has never been commented on either.
This is now my eleventh email. I am not going to stop. To repeat: I am not going to stop. I think a lot can be gained from my experiences with your customer support team and I recommend that you take some time to review the entire affair. I am not at all satisified at this time.
Please pass this email to someone more senior who will be able to write a message outside the customer support templates. I remind you that I am keeping records of every message that I send and receive relating to this episode.
Yours,
Sam Davyson.
Two days later, I got a response:
Hello Sam,
Thank you for writing back to MSN Hotmail Technical Support.
My name is Janet and I am a Subject Matter Expert within the MSN Hotmail department.
I understand that you are totally not satisfied with what is happening.
Sam we would like you to know that we have taken note of your comment, suggestion and efforts on educating Hotmail users, through the article you published, regarding the hoax messages that are roaming around the Internet.
I apologize but we still cannot give you a definite date when the article be published. We are still in the process of reviewing every comments and suggestions we are getting from customers,
We will do our best to counter act the situation.
You are feedback is valuable to us.
Sincerely,
Janet B.
Subject Matter Expert
MSN Hotmail Technical Support
I like this. This is someone who is more superior (perhaps) and they have left the template behind to write a decent email. My article is acknowledged in the message too. I am very glad that she said "you are totally not satisfied" rather than "you are not totally satisified" as the former much better sums up my situation. She also doesn't make the mistake of assuming that I am a Hotmail user which is nice.
And I waited until I sent this on the 23rd June:
Janet B,
I write back to you now as four months since my original request was sent. I can't understand what is happening. Why hasn't my request been put into action? Hotmail representatives have already agreed it is a good idea.
I am writing now to let you know that from July I will be creating a broad scale campaign to get more people to write to you and to request for the insertion of the article. I will be telling in full everything about my experiences with the technical support team, and how it takes you four months NOT to write a simple, but vital, help article.
I am disappointed.
Sam Davyson.
They originally sent me back a message which was incomplete. It was just the first few lines of a standard response. So I emailed back to get another copy of the email which came back as:
Hello Sam,
Thank you for writing back to MSN Hotmail Technical Support.
My name is Mark and I am writing in response to your concern about the truncated message you have received from one of my colleague. I understand that your initial request has not yet been published.
I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. Sam, we have submitted your request to our product development team. They will be the one to evaluate your request and put it into action. Unfortunately, I may not be able to provide you a specific date on when this will be accomplished but I assure you that we are keeping a copy of your request for reference. I will take the responsibility to ensure that your request be given priority.
You are a valuable customer to MSN and we are glad to give you consistent and effective service.
Thank you for using MSN Hotmail.
Sincerely,
Mark Anthony F.
MSN Hotmail Technical Support
Oh dear Mark. He makes the same mistake as the rest of them. Neither am I a customer of MSN, or have I had a consistent and effective service. But I am glad that he is taking personal responsibility for the production of the article. That will be great to see. But I really despair with this team. They write the same things again and again, and they never actually do anything towards my request. Hmm I think I will blog about this again.
I prepared a response. And cross posted it to my blog too to try to get more attention. Here it is. It is sort of a final plea.
Dear Christopher A., Christian M., Christian N., Anne Marie O., Christina S., Vendrelli R., Jimmy B., Janet B., Leo and Mark Anthony F.,
I write to you 201 days since my initial request. Yes two hundred and one days. That is 6 months and 17 days. Interestingly all 10 of the representatives that have written back have indicated that the suggestion I made was a good one and would be included in an upcoming release. Unfortunately however somewhere along the line you misbranded adding a help article as a some sort of product upgrade, rather than the simple task of writing a few words it is.
Never have I had a response from any representative that wasn't highly canned. The template is very clear by now and the deviations from it are often embarrassingly slight. No one seems to be capable of actually doing anything at your end. Yes you can write back, but can you get anything done? No. Of course not.
So in the 201 days that have passed what have you done towards the article? Lets summarise your progress. All 10 of you have done... precisely nothing. You said that time restrictions made it difficult to write. So I wrote the article for you. Why didn't that speed things up? Why isn't my article on your site now?
Why is the paper pushing in your office such a significant part of your job that it is now all that you do? Why has one of the world's largest companies got the most useless support team?
I am doing everything I can to publicise my experiences with your team. And of course I am still desperately pushing to get the article published on your site. The high profile ex-Microsoft employee Robert Scoble commented on the issue with "If I were on the Hotmail team I'd just put up an article that simply linked to this guy's post".
You've lied to me. You've ignored my requests. You've done precisely nothing to help the situation. And still I bet you'll come back with an automated email. Listen. I don't want your automated rubbish. Delete the template. Don't bother to email back if it means you can get the article done quicker. Just "The article is up" would be very good.
I ask again and again to have the contact details of your manager. And of course I don't get them. But I'll ask again. What is the email address of your immediate manager?
As always my article is online and copyright free for you to use at http://sam.davyson.com/hotmail and every email between me and your team is published at http://sam.davyson.com/hotmail/story .
Remember when you reply, your response will join that record.
Sam Davyson.