US Air — Email Response Parsing
I had trouble signing up for US Air’s frequent flyer program (Dividend Miles). I literally tried about eight times, but failed. So, a couple of days ago I spent about 10 minutes looking for a way to send them an email. I found a way, sent my message and shuffled along.
Today I received a response. The customer service representative informed me that I could provide her with my contact information and she would sign me up. So, I hit the Reply button, typed the message, and sent the email.
It bounced. At first I was frustrated, figuring that, yet again, a big company is using a generic email address. I know this makes sense for many reasons, but the practice drives me crazy as a user. In any event, although it was true the email address was generic, that was not the root cause.
After scanning the email, I found the following two lines:
[===> If you need to reply to us, please type below this line ===>]
[===> If you need to reply to us, please type above this line ===>]
No, I’m not kidding. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, except in code comments. Then it hit me. Bing! That is exactly what US Air is doing. They are exposing their technology to me, the end user.
I’ll bet they have code to parse responses from schlumps like me. They probably programmatically evaluate the subject line, which includes an incident number, and then they parse out the text between the two lines. Clever. Maybe.
How about the usability factor? Does cost savings trump usability here?
April 26th, 2005 at 8:05 pm
Hummm…
Clever only for techies. For most users, this is dumb.
A personalized link to a form would have been more usable AND allows them to parse your answer.
April 27th, 2005 at 3:12 pm
Yes… dumb. Also stupid from a security standpoint. Anyone can send data into a program that is parsing their data into the system? What happens if there is a buffer overflow problem in the e-mail parsing program?
So… not only not usable, most people probably never notice those two lines, but also a possible security vulnerability.
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