Best Buy Gives Up On “No Customer Service E-Mail” Experiment After Only 6 Weeks

Look who's back!

Look who’s back!

Perhaps Best Buy was just in a frustrated, overworked mood because of all the holiday shoppers (who were buying stuff on Amazon) when it decided in December to remove the option of contacting customer service by e-mail. Because that contact info has magically re-appeared on BestBuy.com.

Just as in the case of the disappearing e-mail address, it was the folks at STELLAService’s Happy Customer blog that noticed its return to the Best Buy website.

Originally, Best Buy had said it had taken down the e-mail address — which had previously resulted in some hilariously bad customer service — in favor of live chat. The retailer explained that communicating back and forth via e-mail did not “offer the same level of in-the-moment assistance” that you’d get from getting instant, completely scripted responses from a customer service rep on chat.

“While our customers find chat more convenient, we still want to provide that e-mail option,” a Best Buy explains about the recent decision to reinstate e-mail contact. “There were still people who wanted to communicate through e-mail.”

Best Buy’s chat service hasn’t exactly proven to be an industry leader. In its comparison of e-tailers’ chat CSRs on Black Friday weekend, STELLAService could not even include Best Buy because researchers were unable to get through enough times to provide sufficient data. In fact, they were only able to successfully connect to a chat rep 5% of the time.

Its e-mail service didn’t fare significantly better, only responding to 15% of customer queries within 24 hours.

However, the company has performed well in surveys testing how quickly a customer can reach a CSR by phone.

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