As I become older (and grumpier) I have realized that not engaging is the best thing to do, wherever possible. Dirty restaurant / rude staff? Don't go there. Don't like dark patterns on a website? Contact forms don't work? Don't use those sites. And so on. Two reasons - first, most of the time, these businesses know their shit is broken or they're doing low quality work etc. They just don't care. Second, it is good for our own stress levels to avoid dealing with shitty stuff.
Obviously this can't be applied to essential services like healthcare etc.
I've been doing this for years. Unfortunately I'm looking for a job now and there's no escape from it. The job sites, the agencies, the employers' sites - they are all awful.
The best one was an employer's site that described itself as "Easy Apply"! You had to give it a resume, which it parsed, badly, and sprayed randomly into about a thousand text boxes. I thought maybe the problem was starting with a pdf, so I began again with a Word document. The results were exactly the same, suggesting they exported to pdf and used the same shitty parser.
Having to rearrange all this text into the correct boxes was annoying enough, but they weren't just vanilla text boxes. They were janky javascript abominations that responded to input really slowly.
And employers moan that they have trouble finding good staff.
Reminds me of ASML's yearly whining (they form cartels with other tech businesses in the region to keep max compensation down and are then acting surprised that they can't find local engineers who deliberately avoid the company).
Nice, I can't understand their growth potential could be like infinite they operate in the right space and have the right tech and fill in a nice niche. But C-suite and shareholders dividends need to be maximalized and engineeres enslaved I guess. Man I love latestage capitalism /s.
Recently I almost completed one that was equal parts data harvesting form and job application.
The original link was through a third-party job board. The job board tried to trick me into signing up in order to jump to the posting.
The job "app" itself was actually two applications. One was an automated resume parser that was just... incorrect. The second was a manual-entry form that asked for the same information. :D
Funny enough, I got to the "Why do you want to work for A Shady Company with Questionable Morals?" series of questions I was actually given a chance to stop and sober up to the idea:
A human being (allegedly) put together the most byzantine hiring process to conceal something, and if they actually do hire someone, it will be a self-selected fanatic who needs the cash more than the indulgence.
One recruiter asked for my high school scores, from 20 years ago. For a 3 month contract job. Another recruiter wanted to know my salary expectations first, before giving me a single detail about the job. When I refused politely, she yelled at me.
There are lots of adults who never grew up, never learned words like please or thank you, feel super entitled etc.
It is not our job to help these people (unless they happen to be friends or family, even then we can only try). Best thing to do is avoid, and look for good people to talk to, do business with. Life is too short to waste on shitty stuff - people or otherwise
It’s actually good that they are so stupid so soon. It’s nice to filter those people early than to spend time on the application to learn how stupid the organization is.
One memorable part of getting paid coaching for interviews was the admonishment "There is no place for honesty in a behavioral interview. No one is going to check on your story."
It makes sense though. The employer will lie constantly in one of those interviews. It's best to shore up your chances. This is the system employers wanted so give it to them. It's not like you'll be working there in three years anyway.
> Well, that could certainly give the prospective employers plenty of information about the way you behave.
That's the beauty; how would they know? The information is completely unverifiable so all such an interview does is find the person best at telling you what you want to hear.
My guess is that they are trying to vacuum as much information as possible. It is easy to do ("I can do nothing, the client is asking for the high school scores, not me!"). Who knows what they are doing with that data
Is it possible they’re trying to separate out candidates who studied English literature as a matter of typical high school education vs those who studied ESL back in their home countries?
Knowing your ability to communicate in English is a useful metric, but asking for your high school English grade is definitely not the right way to go about it.
For sure, job application submission is an awful mess. As a rule, I won’t apply anywhere that uses Workday, considering they require you to create an account to submit your application.
Truth is, any company that makes getting a job an awful experience (despite every incentive to the contrary) won’t be any better once you’re an employee.
On the flipside, there's Oracle HCM which doesn't let you create an account and makes you verify your email address with each subsequent job app. They rely on cookies for all of this.
No thanks. I'll take workday over that. I like using passwords and don't like tracking cookies, so I guess I'm weird.
Greenhouse and Lever have the most convenient job application interface IMO. The application area is one page, which means you can navigate using tab. There's also no need to create an account and verify email address (Though I understand why some portals do that to prevent spams).
> The best one was an employer's site that described itself as "Easy Apply"! You had to give it a resume, which it parsed, badly, and sprayed randomly into about a thousand text boxes. I thought maybe the problem was starting with a pdf, so I began again with a Word document. The results were exactly the same, suggesting they exported to pdf and used the same shitty parser.
Ohh, let me guess. Workday? There are a few application systems that offer this functionality but workday is _consistently_ the worst at parsing whatever I give it (text, markdown, html, pdf...).
More than one university in the UK had exactly this procedure. I eventually gave up on applying, but even before that I was 90% sure no meaningful information would reach the hiring committee.
* use a dedicated gmail
* use a dedicated google voice number
* have your PDF resume up to date, maybe a few versions of it for different types of jobs
* keep a formatted text version of it as well for those horrible text boxes
i have found the recent crop of SotA LLMs to be extremely useful for the latter few tasks you mentioned. Give it my full, comprehensive CV, as well as a prospective job description, then ask "tailor a condensed resume from the info in my CV to match this job description."
Of course you'll want to review and edit, but it's taken a huge amount of drudgery out of the process, for which I am grateful.
Is it me or has there been an up tick in 3rd party job application websites? When I first applied for jobs it used to be directly on the companies website but nowadays it just redirects to a weird subdmain with weird tracking
Oh god job application forms are a travesty. Every single company seems to do it differently, about half of them seem to like making the form ten times longer than necessary and good luck figuring out whether your submission will actually get checked by anyone or thrown straight into the trash by an automated system.
And I definitely emphasise with the 'easy apply' auto fill crap. Those are incredibly unreliable at the best of times, and a waste of time all around.
But the worst ones to me have to be the incredibly lengthy 'ask everything' forms that way too many large companies and government agencies like too much. The ones which feel less like a job application, and more like filing your taxes. Way too often you'll go for something on LinkedIn, see a form, then notice it says something like 'part 1 of 20' at the top of the page because someone at Microsoft thought letting companies add a ton of unique questions was a 'great' feature.
fr easy aply is so dogshit, most of these parsers for your cv can't handle the most basic shit, with my limited knowledge dealing with headless browsing with phantomjs I could come up with a better solution in an afternoon easily. Sorry but using a parser that can't even read experiences or education section to easy in a >10k+ tech company that does software is just not bearable.
> I could come up with a better solution in an afternoon easily
I once did some contract work to write a parser for that. It wasn't long before I realized the variety of resumes made it completely impractical, and had to abandon the project. (I didn't charge for my time on it.)
If you could do a better one in an afternoon, you can make good money doing that.
It only makes sense to do in business what one has an aptitude for, and pay others to do the other stuff. I bet you don't grow your own food, or make your own soap, either.
Hopefully one of the areas that LLMs can actually improve. I expect an LLM to fairly accurate parse content from resumes. Maybe we even start using plain text resumes.
I expect that LLMs will be used aggressively by a subset of employers for exactly all the lazy and asymmetric power reasons that an employee can think of.. being automation, the footprint of that employer subset will be much larger on the whole, and often be the first or only resort for the desperate, uninformed etc applicants
I agree. I’ve noticed a strong correlation between friction (such as newsletter modals, cookie consent modals, register to read, etc.) and low-quality content that is just a waste of my time to read. Since I realized this, I’ve saved a lot of time and effort by closing a tab as soon as I see one of these tells and not looking back.
I'm really grateful to the low-quality content creators for making it so easy to recognize.
One of the wisest pieces of advice my mother gave me growing up was always to think about what you want out of an interaction. Before you send a text, prepare an email, write a comment, argue a point, etc: what is your goal, and what's the best thing you're going to get out of it?
It's really good advice, because it makes it so much easier to just let things go. Yes, the website I'm using is awful and could easily be done better. Yes, the person I'm taking to is obviously wrong. But I'm not going to get anything out of getting involved - at best some mild catharsis - and I'll just waste everyone's time doing so. So let it go.
Hear hear! Seconded! And all of the other similar phrases of support.
However...I was recently at my neighborhood tavern, and the group down the bar from me got my attention in a way that moved me to action by wanting to donate to their cause. I asked how, and they provided me a URL that took me to a payment portal. It should have been that easy.
Instead, it wanted full account creation with username, email, phone number, and password with specific requirements. After 3 attempts of not being able to generate a valid password, they decided I had too many at the pub and decided to "help". After multiple attempts, they were also unable to generate a password to create the account to take my money.
Their own website and all off the unnecessary account creation policies actively prevented a successful conversion. I laughed and laughed at their folly. Of course, the individuals receiving the laughter were not the ones that mattered regarding this, so I stifled my smugness in this victory and suggested they tell their coworkers.
The fact that it's a "shut up and take my money" is a meme says enough as well. Probably reach more younger people that don't read and only speak in images /s
Completely agree. It may be considered a "loss" if you encounter rude staff, but fighting back won't make you "win", even if you technically do. Your stress and mental state is much better if you just let some stuff go. Obviously not everything, but I'd say that probably goes for the majority of small annoyances in your life.
Unfortunately companies like Anthropic like to provide web sites that work long enough to obtain your credit card information, then break them in a way that prevents you from unsubscribing.
Or have it so it's trivial to sign up online, but cancelling requires contacting them via phone/post/whatever. 'Funny' how well these systems seem to work when people are giving you money, but how much of an unusable mess they turn into when it's the other way around.
State Farm wanted me to speak to my agent directly (who they had never bothered to change from one down in Texas when I told them I moved to Montana), so I gave them written notice through the contact form on their website and then had to file a chargeback when they charged me again.
Got a check from them in the mail a couple weeks later. (For $13.83, I'm not sure exactly what that's supposed to represent)
Some banks offer virtual cards directly, but there's also Privacy (.com). For masked email I find Firefox Relay works pretty well.
I like Privacy because they let me switch banks easily, as well as place spending limits, pause or close cards, etc., just like Firefox Relay would allow me to switch emails easily.
I believe I use Firefox Relay for everything email-related now (I pay $1/mo for my own subdomain), and also use Privacy for everything money-related (given they accept Privacy cards).
https://emkei.cz is a good "fake mailer" for getting outbound email from a Firefox Relay address, for those companies that want you to send them an email from the address on your account. Basically you send something from the company's email to your relay address, then reply to it and Firefox Relay will send it to the real company's email, but from your relay address.
(You know, this sounds like it could make for a great phishing exploit because Firefox Relay doesn't check or notify you if SPF/DKIM/DMARC fails on an incoming email, and the forward that it does to your personal email will be entirely lacking those indicators. So aside from email content itself looking suspicious, it could be possible to perfectly spoof a real email because the relay step strips all the original authenticating information.)
I’ve been using catchall email for everything for well over 5 years now, and it hasn’t been useful once since. Regular spam filters from my provider and occasionally hitting “Unsubscribe” once seem to do the trick.
When you must engage with sub-par experiences, look to redirect in a positive manner. Don't try to brute-force a solution, rather, suggest an alternative that the counterpart may not have considered.
As I've grown older, I've learned unsolicited advice is almost universally despised (and you have a > 50% chance of making an ass of yourself due to lack of context/armchair general). Therefore, start with a complaint, and if they truly want your feedback, offer it.
It’s such a shame. I think I can feel what others do when I get unsolicited advice, but I’m able to regulate my emotions and either take the advice or explain why it’s missing context. If only others could have more humility and analysis ability. But you can’t do too much to change others.
Yes. I browse, I see banner (slide, popup, sidebar), I close tab.
I have friends that ask me if enjoyed the paragraph about something they shared a link to only for me to have to come back and say I closed it after reading two words and getting interrupted by ”Put your email here to read more". Nope. I tell them that is not a good web experience for me.
> Obviously this can't be applied to essential services like healthcare etc.
And that's the reason why you have to engage. Allow things to go that way one time, you'll get them all the time. Protest, politely but effectively, all the time and things will change.
We all suffer crappy services, if almost nobody protest they'll not change, because much of them are used by people with no choice, starting from fiscal stuff.
Totally agree - I will just add that 1 or 2 times a year I do the opposite. I call out stupid when I see it and spare nothing. Clear, straight criticism leveled at management if I can find them.
Your right: they know it's screwed up most of the time. But the front line is not at root responsible ... and I get a bit of extra satisfaction flushing management out into the open so they can't hide out.
I’m getting close to completely abandoning Amazon over this. I recently unsubscribed from Prime and the number of dark patterns in every single checkout, attempting to get users to sign up for Prime, is unconscionable. No wonder so many people are subscribed, the user has to actively fight against it.
I can't remember the number of times that I've selected "Afghanistan" from the contact form list as my country of residence because it was the first option in the dropdown.
Go harder on that – block those sites in your network outright (such as in Pihole). Else you may end up on them in future, either by accident (clicking a link) or temptation.
This is my habit as well. If the company is owned by real people (rather than a corporation), then I'll do the courtesy of sending an email or something to explain why I'm no longer going to use their product/service. Either way, though, I just remember not to use that company anymore and get on with my life.
There's no reason for me to spend my time and energy any further on nonsense.
My favorite person on twitter (plinz) had advice that I loved and try really hard to follow that’s similar to this. If you see a discussion or comment online that bothers you or is frustrating, the best thing to do is not engage with it. Engagement causes that person to post more and effectively creates more of the content that you dislike.
E.g. if no one on the internet ever responded to pro Trump stuff, pro Trump people would get tired of yelling into the void with no reaction.
Yup, Trump would have likely not won in 2016 if he wasn't pushed by the media. I remember the media would not cover Bernie, even when he got big crowds. But the media would wait for Trump to take the stage, showing empty podium live. ALL media (mainstream or social or legacy) know to push controversy, negativity etc because it gets them engagement which gets them dollars. It is also easy and lazy thing to do.
There is a reason politicians push "the other guy is bad" rather than "I am good" narrative in their ads. It works short term at least while doing long term damage
There’s a meme that we are where we are today in the U.S. starting with the Reagan presidency, and there’s certainly a lot of truth to that. But personally I believe American politics began a long downward trend once television became the primary medium. We’ve all heard how JFK outsmarted Nixon during their televised debate by wearing a blue shirt, because blue showed up as white whereas Nixon’s white shirt showed up as gray. The visuals of candidates began to dominate politics, and people made their judgements based that. Would Reagan have even become president if he wasn’t so good in front of a camera?
> We’ve all heard how JFK outsmarted Nixon during their televised debate by wearing a blue shirt, because blue showed up as white whereas Nixon’s white shirt showed up as gray.
Huh. I always heard that Nixon refused makeup and JFK didn’t, with the result being about the same: Kennedy looked healthy and Nixon looked like a sweaty corpse. But considering the quality of TV screens and broadcasts in 1960, the shirt thing sounds more realistic.
He managed to convince the dead in Cook county, Illinois to vote for him, often several times each! I'd consider that a much more impressive first. It eclipses hanging chads and Russiagate in more recent elections. JFK won the election because Nixon conceded even though there were plenty of suspicious circumstances - more than enough to justify challenging the results of a very close election.
Today the people have so little faith in the system and in the candidates that almost half of them don't vote.
I have heard this accusation made about every election my entire life the only change.is the canidate and district. but when you look into it the numbers of voter fraud cases found have been in the low double digits. I think its an urban legend at this point.
It doesn't actually matter whether or not election fraud is "an urban legend." Faith in the system has been lost. That was Nixon's fear and the reason he didn't contest the election results.
This is basically that Treehouse of Horror episode of the Simpsons where the ads go on a crazy rampage and to defeat them all you have to do is "just don't look"
That’s what I figured, too, and then I joined Truth Social to that a peek behind that curtain. It really is just all pro Trump people posting pro Trump stuff and upvoting everyone else’s stuff. There’s little discussion, debate, or internet-typical arguing. It’s everyone just +1’ing each other in the weirdest, most boring echo chamber I’ve seen online.
Yes -- and companies or governments don't want to be _contacted_ by you. It's a cost to them. The median "contact us for a sales quote" form is clearer and has less friction than the median "file a complaint / ask a question" form.
One reason not in the article people might use forms instead of email is the "set and setting" of being a guest on a website and filling out their form. When in "your" email inbox as opposed to on "someone else's" site, you may conduct yourself differently.
An example of this is the sometimes-onerous Github issue template questions. I'm not arguing they're not necessary, but they do two things: mandate required information and _imply_ that you are a guest and you must hold yourself to someone else's communication norms.
> but they do two things: mandate required information and _imply_ that you are a guest and you must hold yourself to someone else's communication norms.
To be honest, tools like this do quite a good job of filtering out people who want you to bend over backward for them. If someone is so stubborn that they refuse to take a couple minutes to fill out someone’s form, they’re likely to be very demanding and uncooperative with every future engagement.
Of course, these people never see themselves as such.
> Yes -- and companies or governments don't want to be _contacted_ by you.
For a company to make a sale, there needs to be a way for the client to contact them, a way to make a purchase. Having crap contact forms makes as much sense as having restaurant waiters spit clients in the face to greet them. With the world we're living in that might become the norm in a few years or months.
I've worked for client who spend a lot of money optimizing form fill-out rates down to the nth degree.
I once worked on a mortgage form. It had a pic of a call center person next to it. I persuaded my boss to try a pic of a dog with a tie, glasses and headset I found instead. It increased the conversion rate by 17%.
If you build a contact form, please at least make it respond automatically with a "we've received your message" email. That at least gives me some confidence that the back end received it and it hopefully went somewhere useful. Without the auto-response I always have doubts if it worked or not.
> If you build a contact form, please at least make it respond automatically with a "we've received your message" email.
I don't think that's such a good idea.
What would stop a bad actor from putting in someone else's email on a whole bunch of sites with this kind of form to spam them?
And what would stop a bad actor from putting in a bunch of randomly generated emails into such a form to DDOS the site?
And what would prevent the form spam being seen as spam by email clients causing real (and arguably more important) messages from also being thrown out and automatically deleted with the rest of the spam?
I can put your e-mail in and type out all kind of swear words or put in phishing link in contact for of a company and you would never know it came from me and you would blame that company.
I had spammers trying that all the time, multiple times they had some confirmation for buyer of their services - well only me got that info because from any public form we always sent out confirmation and "was it you? if not disregard, please" where content went to our special place so it would be safe, like our sales person not clicking some bs link from such contact form.
> Hook up a shared mailbox, collaborative inbox, or one of the many off-the-shelf customer service solutions like Zendesk, Zoho Desk, Freshdesk, Zammad, osTicket, or FreeScout to your email.
This list is missing the classic, and still excellent, Request Tracker.
(I have no affiliation, and I’ve only ever interacted with it from the request-submitting side. But it’s always been straightforward and rock-solid, and it’s worth something that the same system has worked continuously for apparently 20 years. And it’s flexible enough that I once worked with a small institution that wired up Request Tracker for submitting jobs to a large-format printer.)
It's funny how easy it is for something to just keep working when they aren't badly combining it with other services they purchased (hi ZenDesk, I still can't delete users in it because that's part of "Support" which we don't use, but I can create users just fine because that's still part of "Chat").
Last time I worked with RT, to do anything custom you had to script it in perl. That's a language that hasn't been popular for a couple of decades (yes I know it's still running a lot of stuff, but try to hire a Perl dev in 2024), good luck.
Maybe a case where AI could help. But not sure even AI knows about RT "scriptlets"
Yea, something I've noticed lately is that companies are beginning to be OK with letting go of customers they can't just silently and passively milk forever. It used to be, you could call up your cable company and threaten to cancel, and they'd pass you over to a "customer retention" specialist who will give you a deal that lowers your cost to what it was a few years ago. Last time I tried that trick, they put me on a brief hold and then came back to the phone with "OK, sir, your service is canceled as of today. Is there anything else I can do for you?" Whoops!
I complained to Amazon a few months ago as one of my subscription orders was a few days late noting in the complaint that the service “didn’t feel very prime”. The CSR responded by cancelling my prime subscription despite my not even nearly suggesting I wanted this! (So, naturally, I opened a new complaint about this and received an apology and a few months credit added to my reinstated prime subscription).
Sounds like ‘AI’ interpreting your email as a cancellation? Although I have now had LLMs parsing my intent for a support question better than the human employee that was appointed to me.
I've heard of the same thing happening with people trying to negotiate a better phone contract. I don't think there's an alternative though. The credible threat of losing you as a customer is, of course, the whole point.
Reminds me of an old quote: If you can’t walk away from a negotiation, you aren’t negotiating.
> Last time I tried that trick, they put me on a brief hold and then came back to the phone with "OK, sir, your service is canceled as of today.
I canceled Spectrum to jump to a fiber provider. I turned in my equip to a shop and said I was moving out of the country to avoid the retention ordeal.
3 weeks later the plastic cards started coming, every day. Two days ago a Spectrum rep showed up at my house and asked why I quit their service. I explained I needed 1Gb/s upload which ended that part of the conversation.
He next offered me free mobile service which I declined. I closed the door before he could pull out a mix tape.
Nah, the 2024 solution for getting support is through social media. Tag the company account with your complaints, maybe with a few extra tags for large media outlets or popular internet creators that can amplify it.
For example, almost every instance of a YouTube creator retrieving their hacked account in the last few years has been from tagging Team YouTube on Twitter or what not.
Seems the possibility of a social media PR nightmare is the only thing that moves the needle nowadays.
Yeah, that's a huge issue for sure. If you don't use any of these services, then getting support is incredibly difficult.
The only possible alternative might arguably be Hacker News if the company is a tech one, since there are Alphabet/Meta/Apple/Amazon employees that use this site, and having someone on the inside champion your cause seems to also help things get resolved more quickly.
2024 solution? I don't know about that. Companies typically use software to manage these complaints across multiple social media platforms. Ever since Twitter began charging an obscene amount of money for their API, companies just shrugged and said goodbye.
That's a fair point, Twitter's certainly not what it used to be. That said, there are still a surprisingly number of large companies using it, and a fair few them still run ads there. Not sure when they'll move to Mastodon/Threads/BlueSky/whatever, but it hasn't seemingly happened quite yet.
Either way, I'd say the best advice in any case would be "be very difficult to ignore, to the point the company's reputation takes a hit if they don't resolve the issue".
So far I've somehow only run across one LLM support chatbot. And it was actually mostly helpful. Not 100% but decent enough. Better than the old support chatbots that just go "does this FAQ entry solve your problem?" Which it never ever does.
In my experience LLM chatbots are a net improvement because they understand "put me in relation with a human" as opposed to the scripted ones that only spit out the FAQ.
I guess that an LLM is harder to scope and retain, and does what it is instructed to. While traditional chatbots can only do what they are programmed for (e.g. follow a scenario), LLMs are easier to sidetrack. Thus you as a client may have an easier time escaping their context, especially when it's a generic LLM integration done by underpaid contractors.
It really depends, but at least here in france many companies start having support over whatsapp/messenger/the likes. They used to suck hard a few years ago, but my recent experience with sncf connect (french railway company) was surprisingly good given my issue was working around an idiosyncracy of their system.
YMMV as we are talking about chatbots and not plain old forms, thus the interactivity is better and feedback loop to escape the LLM's context is faster.
Where I live, CS is all chat bots that are simply text representations of the phone tree. You can Whatsapp the company! And get the nicely formatted menus.
The rate of spam to a form is roughly constant over time, whereas the rate of spam to a published email address goes up over time as the site is repeatedly scanned by spam robots and the address added to more and more spammer lists. While spam detection is good, it isn't perfect. As your total volume of spam goes up, so does the amount that sneaks through the filters. Additionally, at a certain point it becomes impossible to look in your spam filter for misclassified real email. Eventually you're overwhelmed and have to change emails. If you're going to publish an email address you have to consider it a burnable resource that you will replace once the volume of spam is too high.
If the author hasn't experienced this, I think it must be because they haven't done the exercise of leaving a live email address on a public website for years.
My email address has been on my public website for at least 15 years, and my spam level is constant and manageable. That may simply indicate that I’m not popular enough to encounter the problem, of course.
Same for me - I do get spam, and it's frustrating, but the level seems to be broadly constant over time. I wonder if it's deliberate co-operation between scammers and other spam senders, perhaps in order to keep the total amount of spam just under the threshold that would cause people to actually crack down on the issue. Certainly, receiving only single-digit numbers of spam emails each day keeps it just slightly away from being my personal number one priority to get some proper filters installed.
In my experience, peak email spam was 15-20 years ago. At some point, I got ~500 messages/day delivered to my spam folder. Today the average for the same address is maybe 2 messages/day. Spam filters flagging legitimate emails as spam or not delivering them at all has long been a much bigger issue than any spam that gets through.
Thanks for reading the article! I agree it doesn't consider this point, and I actually hadn't thought of that.
Semi-empirically, I've run some websites with emails and contact forms sitting on them for 5+ years and I haven't noticed this effect. Although I must admit I haven't studied it quantitively well enough to determine this for certain - I'd love to look over the data to see if this is true. Unfortunately on all these inboxes spam is deleted automatically after some time so I no longer have records. If you do have data here, it'd be great to see someone publish this and would happily add a link to this analysis!
And theoretically, would a contact form link not also be a thing that gets added to more and more lists over time and have the same problem? (Although I also didn't notice this pattern on contact forms, so I'm not claiming this does happen - just a thought experiment on this logic!)
Oof I just built a new client contact form for my company. The reason I used a form over email is because (1) a form feels more impersonal so I feel less guilty about not responding to potential clients I have no interest in conducting business with and (2) the form works without JavaScript and I figured displaying an email without JS obfuscation would attract more spam.
One of my favorite EU (or German? not sure) regulations is that every company doing business online has to have an email address they actually monitor for customer contact.
It’s often the only way to get a written answer in a reliable, persistent medium from a company. Corporate support chats are usually horrible; phone calls leave no proof in case of disputes.
Maybe there is also an EU regulation now, but at least in Germany the "Telemediengesetz" was introduced in 2007, where §5 "Allgemeine Informationspflichten" is responsible for the need of an Impressum.
That doesn't include a customer support email though. Most of the times, if not all at bigger companies, there's only an email address in the imprint for legal communication, but specifically not for customer support.
Legal communication importantly covers a subscriber cancelling their contract! This is actually one of my most common use cases for writing to the "imprint" email address.
I'll give you a caveat here. To be clear I think any big company should have easy to fill contact forms since they have the resources but as a solo dev building projects I get so much crap from contact forms. It's not even spam - a significant number of users think of the contact form as a chatbot and will ask personal/lazy questions.
Sometimes its not even questions. Just one off statements like 'I want to use your product'. OK...then use my product?
Its very weird and made me try to hide the form more and add extra fields just to add a little friction.
Tip for "collecting structured data": you can prepopulate the email body using a mailto: link with a "prompt" to the sender to fill out the data you need.
Of course we do. It’s very common for all the categories except “other” to function as FAQs and to give absolutely no support if the issue isn’t precisely in the list. Other is the new “representative”.
The biggest complaint of the author seems to be needing to give out his data to fill a form. This is very much intentional.
In my company, almost all of the contact form submissions tried to sell us something, sometimes in very deceiving way(e.g. I found something broken in your front page which leads to poor search engine ranking, and I can help fix it), if not outright spam.
But this is so frustrating when you need to contact a company and you don’t have the info they want.
A while back we wanted to have the physical landlines from the phone company removed from our house. I found the company, but every contact form asked for my account number. If I didn’t provide one, Id get redirected to their sales team because obviously I was trying to create a new account.
I don’t remember how I got it fixed other than a lot of time on hold.
Interesting related tidbit: you can put initial values for "subject" and "body" in a mailto URL like so: mailto:support@example.com?subject=feedback&body=What+you+were+doing%3A%0AWhat+happened%3A
This lets you provide a template to your users as they prepare to send you an email.
No, my contact form, but just rephrasing the author: why do you put a contact form and don't perform QA and best practices on it?
Also, the contact form is just another channel (that should work) but not the center of contacts. For example WhatsApp business replaces a lot of these forms in many regions.
Yep - strongly agree that if you are going ahead with a contact form, you better QA it.
I'm not a huge fan of organisations shifting to proprietary social networks being a primary contact method (especially if it's that or a broken contact form). But hoping that the Digital Markets Act's interoperability rules might make this a better experience.
> There are some organisations that intentionally want their form to be difficult to complete - perhaps it’s a regulatory requirement that you don’t really want to comply with. If you’re doing this, you should probably feel bad.
Bad contact forms I encounter usually fall into this category.
I'm sure I've said this before on here, but I used to work for a company that provided a SaaS solution to my countries biggest Telecoms provider, and I remember them saying that they actively did NOT want people contacting them - I wouldn't be surprised if at some point actively "hostile" interfaces cost less than meat answering the phones/emails
When I was working at one of the UK’s high street fashion brands we used to regularly get told to make the contact form non functional during periods of high traffic, just an FYI.
The rant should be: „Don’t break your contact form“, forms that are done well are good for both sides. Better triage on the receiver end, quicker response for the sender.
The public-facing contact form (and stupid chatbot) are for people who didn't bother to read the FAQs, shipping information, return policies... basically the rest of the website in a very structured format with numerous links and in proper hierarchy with breadcrumbs. That's why the public-facing contact form is long and have friction.
If you're in the 80% who had self-checked out and paid, you probably won't ever see the contact form and have our customer service email address in a proper "purchase successful" email and you simply reply to that for any follow-up or help.
For many companies it’s a core part of their operating procedure. Cost to acquire, cost to serve and churn reduction being the core elements that they watch like hawks. Answering customer queries eats away at that cost to serve variable.
I perfectly understand why a contact form would reject a mail with the domain "example.com". This is obviously not a valid email domain (and may be the default domain used as greyed example in the contact form).
The contact form is linked in the article [1], and it rejects genuinely valid emails. You can try it yourself and see it doesn't have greyed examples, and that the problem is not example.com but the use of symbols. For example, greffe_acces@montréal.ca is a valid in-use email [2] that is rejected.
example.com was only used to take an example screenshot.
Another issue with these forms is that the communication method is asymmetric. You fill out the form to contact the business, but their only way to respond is by sending you an email.
And then the email has a “noreply” address. Earlier this year I had a whole conversation iteratively submitting the same unidirectional contact form for each turn of dialogue.
My favorite is one for a local utility. Their payment page has a box for the account number. The account number has dashes in it. The box has a headline "enter your account number, WITHOUT THE DASHES!"
There are a lot of public services and a big insurance company quoted as examples in the blog post. From my consulting experience I can easily imagine how much work, meetings and ceremony got poured in each of these contact forms. Surely they all got enterprisey backends with Spring Boot and whatnot. In another world a junior dev could create better, faster, more ergonomic forms in less time with a more pragmatic approach.
> In theory, your customer might be using an email provider that doesn’t support encryption - which could lead them to sending something to you insecurely and putting them at risk. I think most organisations can accept this risk given how rare this is, given that this is on the customer’s end.
I think we’ve reached the stage where major providers are rejecting messages over cleartext, right? Requiring either explicit TLS or STARTTLS?
I seriously doubt it. I've tried to set up my (tiny) company email TLS-only, and had to backtrack two days later when two different customers complained that their emails were bounced. One of them was representing a major national bank. I've lost the last bit of hope for e-mail I had.
A bit off-topic but is there some law in the US that mandates people to say things like "This article is written solely in my personal capacity, and does not represent the views of any organisations I am affiliated with."?
I'm one of the few I know off that anytime (almost) I discover a crappy service/UI/* I take time to document and protest. Unfortunately most people protest only with their friends instead of barking at those who made the crap...
If we all take time to write USEFUL feedback than even org run by ....... have to take the cry into account.
Holy crap the example of the Sanisbury’s contact form is a brilliant piece of passive-aggressive design. It really screams “We do not want to hear from you over the Internet, peon”.
I think it is an awful design at present, no doubt about it.
It might not be fully intentional though [1]. I suspect it probably started as a more sensible form, with the top text being just the first sentence. Then they realised they got loads of refund contacts that they preferred to deal with by phone so just added the text - without realising how terrible this made the UI.
> At time of writing, B&Q’s contact form just plainly doesn’t work1. I am fairly amazed that a retailer with revenues in the billions doesn’t notice written queries have stopped coming in.
I've noticed customer service forms on brand Web sites are often broken, most commonly by some Web backend error at submission time, but there are other ways, too.
For some brands, a broken contact form may be incompetence or corporate dysfunction. But for some of them, it could be a a lazy dark pattern, to reduce customer support costs.
(Dark pattern similar to how, when waiting in a holding pattern for telephone customer service, they barge in every 30 seconds, to jolt you into thinking they might be picking up, but then blare, "Your call is important to us! Please remain on hold, and the next available customer service representative will assist you." I assume they know they're making the on-hold experience so much worse.)
Of the forms that do work, I'd say at least half the time they trigger an automated email response to call customer service on the telephone. The exact thing you were trying to avoid by opting for a Web form, where you could avoid telephone hell, and also concisely capture the pertinent information in a way that wouldn't get garbled by a CSR (or later by a manager trying to hide a problem).
When I have gotten a non-automated email response, it's often someone ignoring the message and latching onto a keyword to send a boilerplate response. Maybe that's good for a poorly treated CSR's metrics, and maybe it also suits someone else's metrics/KPIs/OKRs.
Or it's an entirely new boilerplate form, to be done in email, since apparently they asked the wrong things in their Web form. Maybe that one is mostly just ordinary corporate dysfunction, and it also ends up working for some people.
Separately, for companies that provide a contact email address... there's the email bounce messages, when the contact address was an email alias that forwards to someone no longer there. Clearly, making sure customer service is covered is
When I'm contacting a company, it's usually about a problem they should want to know about, such as if they care about safety. Though I assume that's not the majority of the kinds of complaints they hear. I have sympathy for anyone doing support for large numbers of retail customers/users, but if you chose to do a business that involves that, you can't be disingenuous or negligent about it.
On the other side, a typical contact form message reads something like... 'Of course I have read the FAQs but just wanted to ask the exact same question which happens to be the very first FAQ on the list...
Also, publishing an email address seldom works out well.
Sure but that message would be no worse if sent by email instead of contact form.
And he does address the "risk" of publishing an email address. I can second that I've seen more spam from WordPress forms than published email addresses.
> You might want to use a contact form to collect structured data, so it saves you time processing requests. For example, making sure the customer provides the right identifiers for you to find them on your systems quickly, or automatically assigning queries to the right teams.
As the author alludes to, I think collecting structured data from unstructured input (e.g. inbound support emails) is a very promising real-world use case for LLMs. The goal would be to make it as easy as possible for users to send you information, and then use AI to parse what you need out of it. This would lead to less frustrated users and even increased response rates (for reasons the author mentions).
This does seem pretty cool. I have not spent too long looking at this but a few bits of initial feedback:
1. Appreciation for an informative site: I like that your website actually explains what your product does in simple terms. So many marketing sites are impossible to parse, so it's cool that this one gets to the point quickly. Bonus points for having a live demo without a sign up.
2. Dealing with uncertainty / edge cases: One worry I'd have is that this might miss things that are relevant, or doesn't capture uncertainty well. I'd probably want a default of a 'flag for a human because this doesn't fit in the boxes well' marker by default on all forms. For example, if someone responds to the conference example with 'Sure, I'll be there on Monday and I wear a size M. Also I am in a wheelchair so will need the venue to be accessible - please let me know if it's not.', I'd want to make sure this gets flagged rather than the automated system ignoring the last part (especially as people might expect humans to read the response to an email).
Contact forms are a way for companies to offload work onto you, so the data you're sending them is structured in their preferred manner.
That argument goes away with LLMs, which can be decently used to process free-form mail. But then, a company with an already awful contact form will hardly do the work to implement that.
I guess there's space for a startup doing that and selling it as a service.
Incredible, just last week there were people ranting about email as a communication tool, and I was genuinely surprised because my experience is that people still prefer to just send an email to support@communick over asking a question on my support Discourse instance.
We're sitting here blaming companies, but lazy, inexperienced or insufficiently skilled developers can and should be blamed for a significant number of the issues he mentions. The state of software on the web in aggregate is generally abysmal. There's dozens of factors that could lead to apathy about quality, but if you care about UX, you could start by ensuring that what you personally produce has excellent UX, and pushing back on peers or higher-ups where what they specify for you to build is bad (and if you don't know what is good or bad, educate yourself.)
Obviously this can't be applied to essential services like healthcare etc.