LETTER: Online companies need better ways to contact them

To the editor:

Today I thought I was a victim of a brushing scam. An unsolicited package arrived - I hadn't ordered anything.

Doing due diligence I reported it to Amazon because that item was sold on Amazon but the parcel itself did not come from Amazon - a plain grey bag. After I filed the report I felt I'd done the right thing.

However, my son forgot to tell me he ordered something for his daughter's birthday and for some reason put my name on the parcel. He often gets his Amazon purchases delivered here as he works and I'm retired. But in the past, they come in his name.

So the parcel was legit and the right thing to do is to inform Amazon. That's the problem. At one time Amazon had chatbots or live people. They've eliminated that. They have a system where you tick the problem and it goes to the menu to deal with it.

Nowhere can you tick 'oops the parcel that arrived wasn't a scam.' So I wasted over thirty minutes hopping around from web page to web page trying to find out how to contact them. It's an online company but you can't really contact them. Your reason for contacting the company must fit into their system. So now I have filed a false report and I feel bad about it.

Why am I telling you this? Because it isn't just Amazon - many companies are using pages with menus that most people can navigate most of the time. But if you have something that doesn't fit the menus offered - you can't achieve anything.

The ones that have chatbots can be a problem also. The good ones will have the chatbot refer you to a live person if you can't explain the problem in a manner the chatbot can understand. But there are others who only have chatbot - and the chatbot will just keep asking 'Can you rephrase that'. So once again if you can't fit your problem in their box you can't tell the company what the problem is.

And this is why I don't like shopping online and dealing with online companies. My money fits into their box just fine, but if there is a problem and that problem doesn't fit into their box it cannot be resolved.

Roberta Livingstone
North Bay