So previously I shared my experience with Amazon customer service chat.
At that time, it was for my order of a physical product.
At the end, the product arrived a few days later as the customer service chatbot suggested.
But tracking pages on both Amazon and USPS websites never showed that update, which gave me a mixed feeling.
This time though, it was about a protection plan for a device that I purchased on May 30th.
This protection plan was supposed to be delivered via email within 24 hours, because basically it was just a policy document.
But I did not receive it even after the 24 hour had passed, so I initiated a chat session on June 2nd.
Here’s how the messaging assistant responded.
Your package with this item has shipped and it’ll arrive by Fri, Jun 05.
Since it was coming from an Amazon seller who handles their own shipping, you can email them to find out next steps.
If you don’t hear back in 48 hours, come back and we can help.
This sounded as if it will be delivered physically.
Also it contradicted with what Amazon initially informed me when I was placing the order, which was that “Your protection plan documents will be delivered via email within 24 hours of purchase.”
So I asked the messaging assistant to connect to a customer service agent, a live person.
When I described my concern to an agent, she replied me as follows:
I will send an email to the seller to send you the policy.
Your protection plan documents will be delivered via email within 24 hours of purchase. Remember to check your spam folder.
If you don’t receive it, send an email to xxx@xxxxx.com with your plan order number and they will resend.
This is their contact number. xxx-xxx-xxxx. You can reach out to them via this number. Does this help?”
So I checked my spam folder, but did not find anything.
And when she finally sent an email to the seller, I did receive an email from the seller probably triggered by the Amazon agent’s email.
And then a few minutes later, I did receive the protection plan from the seller via email.
When I asked the agent on why the messaging assistant initially gave me the wrong information, she simply said:
Please ignore that. I have verified with my leadership team. It does not deliver physically.
Since I did receive the product via email after the agent sent an email to the seller, it’s all good now.
But because I had a mixed feeling about this,
I expressed my concern to the agent while the chat session was still on:
I’m a bit concerned about the wrong information that I got from the chatbot for my future purchases. If it’s a chatbot glitch, it should be fixed as it’s very confusing for a customer.
The customer service agent replied back:
I concur. I will pass along this information to the dedicated team. Thank you for highlighting.
Again, the reason why the chatbot initially gave me a wrong information might be just a software glitch.
But I wonder, if the chatbot was programmed intentionally to give a canned answer with an arbitrary delivery date a few days later just to ease a customer’s concern and buy some time for them without actually checking the details in their database and shipping logs.
Or simply Amazon may not have an ability to check purchased product’s delivery details for those with 3rd party sellers.
I don’t know.
Amazon’s customer service chatbot works well overall.
It’s great that you can initiate a session anytime whenever you have any issues.
Still, it seems to always give me some concerns.
And I hope that they fix these glitches, especially given that Amazon is considered one of the most advanced tech giants with wealth of development resources.
Check out YouTube version too.
Here’s my first article on Amazon customer service chat.