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Comment by plantain | Hacker News Reader

>the Apple account re-activation team can only be contacted by email and the process takes at least 3-5 business days. He emailed them.

This trope of one team being unable to contact another team except via email seems to be popping up more and more in my customer service interactions - it feels like an active and intentional impediment to actually getting anything done. Why do companies do this?

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In several instances I've seen, it's because that function has been outsourced but the company doesn't want to advertise that, even to its own employees. If you could talk to that department on the phone, you'd realize you were talking to someone in a different country (plus they'd have to work at strange hours in India, the Philippines, etc.).

This is not uncommon at large companies,

- because different divisions have different budgets, you might see each department running their own Slack, etc.

- you want to make sure work doesn't fall on the floor, so you want a persistent queue of requests. I see this almost always as a Google form or via email - except development organizations.

This doesn't surprise me: on a SaaS service, we already had people contacting us like "hello, someone on my company is using your service, could you help me locate them?", and it was not scam, a genuine person lost in their own company.

Just a guess. It prevents “dumping” calls that are difficult or you don’t want to handle off on another department with limited resources.

By forcing another department to only work through email makes them exhaust all options first.

My guess was that the team is actually an engineering team and the email comes in and your concerns are now a Jira ticket for the most inexperienced person on the team to debug.

It's especially concerning that Apple, who prides themselves on streamlining difficult tasks, would do something like this. Maybe it lends insight into their priorities...

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