Way back when, in the dawn of time, (actually 1995), when we first got our internet access here, there were these people called "Webmasters", or in some cases, "Webmistresses". These were the people who you would look to if you found an error, or had any problems with a particular site. For example, let's say you encountered a problem at "www.yourbankhere.com". You would just send an e-mail to "webmaster@yourbankhere.com" with the nature of the problem. Most of the time, you would get a response pretty rapidly. And, it would be a real person on the other side, not a robot. Most likely, if you were to do something similar today, you will get an e-mail stating that no such person exists, etc. It has been really difficult to find out who to write to, on a few sites, when you encounter errors with the site itself.
Today, I went to CHASE to sign up for online bill paying. Even though I pay my Chase bill through, mycheckfree.com, I wanted to also be able to do it through Chase's site itself. Just in the off chance that I may want to make a same day payment. This also would allow me to view my bills online and stop the paper bills coming to the house. After going through 4 pages of filling in information and agreeing to their terms, etc., I get to the final page and click, "submit". I get an error. In bold red letters, it tells me that I do not have permission to access this page and it gives me an error number. So, I highlighted all the error info, and then tried to find where you complain about problems with the website itself. So, I clicked on good old, "Contact Us". There was a list of FAQ's they wanted you to look through before you sent an e-mail. None of the FAQ's covered anything to do with errors on the website. So, then they had a list of various problems and the e-mail addresses of where you send inquiries for these particular problems. Again, none of them had to do with any errors you encounter on the site itself. If your problem didn't fit any of those categories, they had a "General" e-mail address that you could send any questions or problems to. So, I wrote to that, and told them exactly what I had been doing, and I pasted the error message in the message too. First, I got the robot response, thanking me for the inquiry. Then, I got a human response telling me that if I encounter any problems with the web site, I must call their 800#. Yeah right..... Doesn't matter anyway, it seems that my application went through. I received a confirmation e-mail from them just a few minutes ago.
I had a similar problem with the website of the dealership where I bought my car. I tried to make an appointment online to bring my car in for an oil change. After typing in all my information, including the VIN#, mileage, model, etc., and picking the date and time, I got an error message. So, I again, clicked on contact us. I got a page asking me for all my information. At the bottom was a comments box. So, I wrote about the error I encountered. About 15 minutes later, my phone rang. It was a salesman from the dealership wanting to know what type of car I was interested in buying. "I just bought a car!!!! I was trying to let you know you have an error on your page. I didn't contact you to buy a car!" He wasn't too happy about that. Neither were the salesmen who sent me e-mails, wanting to know which model I was interested in. After I explained to them what happened, one of them told me that he would have it looked into. (It's still not fixed). *sigh*
Posted by Valkyre at March 6, 2004 08:06 PM