Category: Retail Email

Part of customer service these days is to accomodate customers. Seems like a no-brainer. Walgreen’s, however, has moved into the wonky concept of customer service when it comes to unsubscribing from email promotions.

I’ve unsubscribed several times over the past several weeks. And I still get their emails. The second to last time I tried to unsubscribe I got a message that my email address was not in the database. See image below.

Even though not in the database, I’m still getting emails. On January 8, 2021, I try again, and now I get a page to unsubscribe where the unsubscribe button is grayed out, meaning the button is not active.

Walgreen’s concept of customer service is wonky, to say the least. My option now is to start a) marking all emails from Walgreens as spam, hoping Walgreens’ email server gets blacklisted or b) make daily visits to the manager of the local Walgreens so that he or she can get on the phone with the corporate office. Oh, I guess there is one other option in Washington State: sue Walgreens for non-compliance with the unsolicted email law.

Update 2020-01-14: Called Walgreen’s customerNONservice again today and asked to talk with the IT department. Said they would have to have someone call me back. I gave my number and guess who called? A Walgreen’s Customer Service Robot! I guess that is the definitive action that Walgreen’s sees customers as impersonal money machines.

I recently received a promotional email from T-mobile telling me about the great deal Rhapsody.com was giving to T-Mobile customers: unlimited streaming through the T-mobile network for $4/month without affecting my monthly data allocation.

I decided to check it out on my T-mobile enabled tablet. The streaming was fine. Then I wanted to add my own URLs for private streams I already had off my own personal audio server.

I could not find a way to add a private stream.  So, in desperation, I wrote to Rhapsody customer service asking if there was a way to add my own URL streams. The response:

“Thank you for your feedback. I will pass it to our product teams. Our development team will work research on this and will do the needful available in future. ”

What’s the problem with this response?

1. It is illiterate — check out the third sentence.

2. The response does not directly answer my question.

This kind of communication tells me a lot about Rhapsody:

a. The corporation does not have much regard to potential paying customers

b. The corporation does not have much regard for its own product

Further, I am familiar with the Rhapsody headquarters in Seattle. HQ is located on floor 31 of the Columbia Center.  Rent at this location is not cheap. I can easily see that money for HQ is more important than money for the people who actually deal with customers. So, I add another item:

c. The corporation puts customer service  — and happy customers —  at a low, low priority.

I decided to pass on the offer.