In its ruling of November 23, 2017, the KG Berlin decided that companies such as Google must provide an email address for customer inquiries in the legal notice (Ref.: 23 U 124/14).
Google is still not allowed to respond to customer inquiries by means of automatically generated standard responses that merely draw consumers’ attention to help pages and other contact options.

Consumers have a right to uncomplicated contact

The lawsuit was filed by the Federation of German Consumer Organizations (vzbv).
According to the vzbv’s legal officer Heiko Dünkel, “consumers have a right to be able to contact online providers by email and get in touch with them easily. A company may not refuse this communication by not even reading customer inquiries.”

According to the German Telemedia Act, commercial website operators are obliged to enable their customers to contact them quickly and easily by electronic means.
The easiest way to do this is by e-mail.

Google used automated response emails as customer service

However, Google’s address stated in the legal notice turned out to be a “dead letter box”.
Customers who sent an inquiry to support.de@google.com only received an automatically generated response with the note: “Please note that due to the large number of inquiries received at this email address, emails cannot be read and acknowledged.”
In the reply, Google also referred to its help pages, via which other contact forms could be accessed.

KG Berlin: Google must enable individual responses to queries

The Berlin judges shared the opinion of the vzbv.
Google’s handling of customer inquiries violated the Telemedia Act and was therefore unlawful.
The provision of an email address, which is not managed by the company in any way, simply does not enable individual communication.
Rather, this is denied by the automated response.
The pre-formulated standard letter regularly simply rejects the customer’s communication request.

Furthermore, the KG Berlin stated that contact forms, user forums or online help do not comply with the legally prescribed form.
The reason: contact forms are often difficult to find on the websites.
The consumer must first “click through” the website individually – if there is even a separate form for the specific request.