Customers "opting out" of receiving messages

Anyone else finding this a problem?

Amazon’s new system of allowing customers to opt out of receiving messages is ABSURD!!! It is one of the most ill thought out ideas I have seen regarding customer service ever.

Customers who have opted out of receiving messages are not receiving our responses, EVEN WHEN THEY INITIATED THE CONVERSATION!!!

Sure I get that with new GDPR rules customers must be given an opt out from marketing and unsolicited emails, but when THEY initiate the conversation because they have an important question to answer, and then our replies get blocked by Amazon cant they see how damaging that is???

This means that, in a recent example of ours today (amongst many), the customer has an order issue and has contacted us to inform us of the issue, we have responded with a resolution but they are not receiving our responses due to opting out and keep messaging us getting more annoyed saying “why aren’t you responding”

And yes I know that you can “work around” by logging into Seller Central, going to the order info page, clicking “contact customer” and then choosing “additional info needed” before typing out the message within Seller Central itself… but for any Amazon business dealing with thousands of orders per week or month you will know that we use Customer Service software such as eDesk or FreshDesk to bring all Amazon messages into a 3rd party inbox and manage them properly, so we do not manage customer communications inside Seller Central, it would not be plausible when answering 4,000 support tickets each month from various sources.

Amazon’s buyer-seller messaging system was poor already, but this is the biggest backwards step in customer service on Amazon that I have seen in 5 years.

I hope they amend it, quickly.