Please don’t contact us, part 1
Last year two colleagues and I went off to teach in India for a bit. Having never been to India, I felt a compelling need (excuse?) for a new digital camera to record my keen takes on local architecture. After considerable research, I landed on the Samsung NV-10. 10 megapixels, more-or-less intuitive interface (less, as it turned out), small footprint, a design award, and a great price on amazon had me hooked. And to its credit, it performed admirably in all the places I took it.
Fast forward a year and change. About four weeks ago, it stopped working. The lens wouldn’t retract. And it wouldn’t turn on, stay on, shoot anything, or tell me what was wrong. I did what any electronically-engaged consumer does: I googled “Samsung NV-10 lens won’t retract” and came up with a number of blog posts from owners who had the same issue. And an alarming uniformity regarding variations of the sentence, “don’t expect any help from Samsung.”
But, this is America and innocent until proven guilty, right? So I went to Samsung’s website, to the NV-10 support page and found, well, no page: “we did not find any results for NV-10.” OK, maybe I just wasn’t clear. Let’s try “search by model number.” Enter “NV-10″ and…”Sorry…No items matched your query.” Hmm. OK, quick check: pick up camera…yep, it’s a Samsung. Yep, it says NV-10. Let’s try “search by product category” and…the drop-down list won’t drop down. Maybe it’s Safari. Let’s open Firefox and…same thing. OK, let’s try IE on my Vista machine. Same thing, no drop-down list. Oh wait. It’s NV10, not NV-10. The hyphen I’d mistakenly put in really confused them. Funny, when I googled Samsung I’d mistakenly typed “samsing” and quickly hit enter and at the top of google’s list was “Did you mean Samsung?” These guys might want to think about that. Remember, the idea is always to make it easier for the consumer. A hyphen shouldn’t bring everything to a screeching halt.
Anyway, when I finally did get to the support page, there was no mention of this problem. In fact, there was no mention of any real problem, just a regurgitation of the instruction booklet. No community page. Not even a “Contact Samsung” link. But there is one on the FAQs page: “send us an e-mail and we’ll try to help.” So I did. In mid-March. Today is April 7. I’ve heard nothing, not even “Hey, we got your email.”
This has been said a million times, but it clearly bears repeating: if your web site has a “contact” button, you have to actually admit the possibility that some people are going to use it. And expect, look forward to, anticipate, and are hungry for — a response.
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