I recently bought a couple of albums on bigpondmusic. One album only partly downloaded - several songs failed. After a couple of attempts in which he same songs failed, I had to contact customer service as I was locked out.
Now, before going any further, lets agree that my PC browser and home network were clearly able to handle downloading, as one album downloaded fine, and the second one only failed on a few songs. The error war "unknown server error" - and the same few songs failed each time. Most likely a problem on the bigpond server, right?
Anyway, I received an email reply - very promptly - suggesting that I re-set some browser settings. "Hang on" I thought, "that was quick!" And how likely is this to fix the problem, given that it is unlikely that my browser is the issue? Despite my suspicions I did as they asked and... still could not download the songs.
I'll save you the tediousness of the next five emails, over two days - suffice to say that each time the response was just as quick, and each time the suggested fix involved me doing more work and wasting more time, and not fixing the problem. I asked twice to have the problem escalated, and was assured that I would be called back - but no call ever came.
So, having some experience with CRM and service automation, I quickly concluded that I was receiving canned, automated responses - maybe not even from a human. They were quick, they were courteous, but they were WRONG! Service automation systems are no excuse for laziness; giving the wrong answers, and ignoring the information that the customer provides - even if they do cut costs and allow prompt service. Sometimes a human brain is a necessary part of the process!