Certainly it is their company but it is common courtesy to reply to communications in a timely manner. If they really don't want to deal with the end customer even a reply such as "Thank you for your email. We no longer deal directly with owners please contact your nearest dealer" would suffice if that is what they want. Mind you to stop dealing with owners would be a break in the Morgan tradition and would be moving in the direction of the anonymous executives of every other car company.
Oh, absolutely, I have no wish to appear as some kind of MMC apologist.
One phenomenon I have come across over the years is that sometimes employees with heavy workloads become fixated on the task that is demanding their attention right now, and can lose track of the bigger picture - so failing to reply to an email that is not on their critical path can have wider ramifications - like reputational damage.
In some organisations, employees are often driven solely by their KPIs and targets, and if 'Keeping the customer satisfied' isn't one of the things they get measured on , it's just not going to get sufficient attention.
This is one reason why the concept of
Muri, reducing burden on workers, is just as significant as
Muda (elimination of waste) and
Mura (reduction of variation).
Answering emails is one of those things that carries asymmetric effort. It's very easy for a dissatisfied customer to bang out an email saying "Why haven't you fixed my Discombobulator yet?", it takes less than a minute, but the recipient has to do a great deal more work to find out who is looking at the issue, go and talk to them, get an appraisal of the situation, check with the relevant management as to what tone of answer is required, and construct a suitable reply that doesn't further commit the company to deadlines it may not be able to meet. So getting a meaningful response together can represent a not insignificant cost to the company.
But yes, even an automated reply would be better than nothing. How about:
"Dear Customer, thank you for contacting MMC. Rest assured that we are giving your enquiry our fullest attention and will reply as soon as we can.
If you do not hear from us within the next 2 weeks, please read this email again."
