Everything you do as a business speaks to your customers.

I got an email from Quicken the other day saying that they were shutting off certain services, including downloading info from banks. (How and why that should affect my desktop software, which I thought connected directly, is another version of the message in this post while being entirely different.) There’s a link to upgrade and save $20 for the privilege. What swell folks.

Occasionally, I read the fine print at the bottom of emails. (It’s an occupational hazard.) This choice language appears:

If you have any questions or comments about this e-mail, please DO NOT REPLY to this e-mail, because it is not a monitored mailbox.

Now, that happens to be pretty common in corporate emails for lots of reasons that stem from using third-party services/software to send email to huge numbers of customers and track the results. But what struck me here is that there’s nothing ELSE. No suggestion of what to do with your question or comment: no email link, no web form. You might assume that what they’d tell you to do with your question or comment isn’t very nice.

But since this is an “e”-mail, maybe this address at the bottom makes sense as an easy way to communicate with customers:

Intuit Inc., Customer Communications, 2800 E. Commerce Center Place, Tucson, AZ 85706

What’s the message of this email from Intuit?

Don’t ask questions; kindly just give us money — we don’t care what you think. It makes me wonder why to even include the “we’re not going to respond to your email” disclaimer if they’re not going to be receptive to any communication in the first place.

Intuit has (had?) a huge market share. But I can’t get a decent version for my mac after switching nearly two years ago. Is it any wonder that other companies have been making inroads. (Sure, they *bought* Mint in 2009; they didn’t come up with it.)