Suppliers Are Avoiding Me - How About You?

March 18, 2009

Does it sometimes seem like suppliers are hiding from you and making it as hard as possible to contact them? That certainly happens to us here at the magazine, and it happened to me quite often during my days as an automation customer. 

Does it sometimes seem like suppliers are hiding from you and making it as hard as possible to contact them? That certainly happens to us here at the magazine, and it happened to me quite often during my days as an automation customer. 

We typically know the names of the main suppliers that we should contact for an article, just as you often know the names of the suppliers you'd like to contact for your project. The problem is finding an actual informed person at the supplier.  A favorite ruse seems to be providing a general e-mail contact such as [email protected] where one is supposed to send editorial and customer inquiries. In my 30 years as an automation customer and an editor I’ve never had one of these general inquiries result in eventual contact with an actual human.  

Do you have a nightmare story of your own to share, one in which you just weren’t able to easily and quickly reach the right person at a certain supplier? Let us know.