Why “we-listen”

This post is by Frank Podlaha, our CTO at GoGrabLunch.com. From time to time he’ll throw in his 10 cents (binary joke …never mind).

The other day I needed to contact an online vendor for something specific. I pulled up their last e-mail, an invoice receipt no less, to find their contact info. I hit reply only to see their e-mail account was a “no-reply @ such and such dot com”. Boy, that really irked me. I let out the usual barrage of “what’s wrong with these people” and other bleep-able items.

All I wanted was an easy way to contact someone. Now I had to login to their website and navigate to their Contact Us page, only to find no contact e-mail or phone number. Why do businesses do this, I wondered. What ever happened to all this customer service hoo-haa?

Then it hit me, Oh.. My.. Goodness.. “no-reply” is exactly what I did on the automated e-mails on GoGrabLunch.com. I sat there in my office turning red with embarrassment. How could I be so careless? While I’m usually the type to pay attention to the smallest detail, it’s the software engineer in me, I certainly missed the boat on this on. I wondered how many times people sat looking at their inbox with our horrible flashing neon sign that says, “We sent you this e-mail, but we really don’t care what you think. DO NOT REPLY!”

Quickly I fixed that problem. Our automated e-mails now come from our we-listen@gograblunch.com account. And yes, we do listen. We always have.

~frank