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Comment by ng-user | Hacker News Reader

Was the email you guessed perhaps first.last@homedepot.ca?

I honestly don’t think many executives are trying to hide their emails that hard. Steve Jobs always got a lot of press when he would reply to customers, but the reality is that executives actually value this communication. It helps them learn of problems they may otherwise be insulated from. Of course executives generally also don’t make their email too readily available because then everyone would contact them and that wouldn’t scale.

I have emailed various executives over the years and don’t recall it ever not working. It even worked with Comcast to my surprise - the next day someone from some department like “executive customer service” contacted me.

Be aware that these guys rarely read their email themselves. They have a dedicated team that handles all these requests, usually on their own.

(I’m not an executive, but I have good insights)

Fine, but that's even better.

It means they are doing something like using the execs inbox as a black-box monitoring stream to find out about problems that internal info gathering will miss. And better still, actually paying people to triage the alerts!

Yeah, this of course happens at the CEO levels, but I don't think it undermines the principle. If those people reading the emails are empowered to actually fix problems and if they are reporting back experiences to the CEO or relevant executives the information still makes it into the org.

In my experience, based on the email thread I think the CEO of Home Depot actually did read it. I left out a step in my story. What actually happened is the VP of Loss Prevention emailed me asking for my number so he could call me. I gave it and he called me. He actually replied to me via the original email. From the thread I could tell that the CEO forwarded it to the VP of Home Depot North America with something like "Jane, can you look into this?" then that person forwarded it to the VP with a more specific request. Based on my internal experiences at big companies this is pretty common.

Jeff bezos sends all his mail to a low grade support team in India who have terrible canned responses

Hilarious if true, given that Amazon frontline support is generally excellent.

I tried jeff@ once. I received a quality reply in <24 hours and my issue was resolved. As far as I can remember the English was perfect.

I got a canned reply that didn't address the fundamental issue, but yes the English was perfect.

This has been my experience as well, I emailed Lisa Su about some issue I was having with an AMD product and she (or her team that monitors her email) were very responsive and helped me sort my issue out.

you can mostly guess these emails because they all use predictable patterns.

The trick I use is to just find any random persons email with a google search (ex "@homedepot.com") and use the same pattern for the person I am trying to reach at the given organization, it works most of the time.

That should work for almost any reputable company. They know that pissed off customers are loud, and they know those customers will probably try to email the CEO. So make it easy, and let the executive response team turn a loud angry customer into a happy, content customer.

I don't abuse it, but let me tell you, when I emailed Mary Barra @ GM a few months ago because the regular customer service was having no luck finding the car I had already ordered and paid for, even though OnStar showed it 20 miles away -- a gal from the executive response team called me a couple hours later and she already located the car, had someone on-site do a physical verification, and arranged for a truck to go pick it up and take it to the dealer so I could take delivery. Then she called several more times over the next couple days to make sure everything from that moment forward was going smoothly.

She turned me from a rapidly-getting-more-angry customer to a much more relaxed, happy customer with a bit of renewed faith that GM isn't totally a lost cause ;-).

Heh, I did the same kind of thing with a government agency. Well, more like 50 addresses.

I got a few replies.

Now I'm filing an Access to Information request to see what happened with all of the emails.

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