I have recently had the great displeasure of participating in three different levels of grief and suffering with three different technology companies. All three were so terrible that I felt compelled to write about it and post the results here, in the unlikely hope that someone might learn from my pain. So here it goes…
Adobe: decided that it is OK to hang up on my calls twice for support to activate a product that I had purchased, transfer me between two different call centers and different support staffs in India, force me to repeat the same trouble-shooting steps no less than 8 separate times, and to, in the end, blame me for causing a problem which could only be repaired by tweaking their own registration servers. Just to get Photoshop to run.
HP:spent the better part of three hours bouncing my call between different call centers, different divisions of the company, taking over remote control of my PC, forcibly causing the loss of installed drivers and patches and lecturing me extensively on how I knew nothing about computer hardware to troubleshoot a problem, only to claim that the “outgoing phone lines are down” so that they couldn’t call me back for three days. In the end, I relented and used the combination of the Internets free help (from other poor, tortured HP owners souls) and a Linux boot CD to restore functions to my USB ports.
AT&T: sent me around and around in circles for more than a week, trying to explain to me that “new services are available in your area”, but then deciding that no service has been improved, but that they can save me money if only I would switch to a new plan. This led to nearly a week without any working DSL service, a series of confused support technicians, a promise of a new DSL modem that never appeared and a considerably more expensive bill than I started with for the same level of service I had before. Extra pain points are awarded for having the local repair truck workers tell me that in 30 days or so fiber will be available in my area that will render all of this moot.
So who is the winner of this round?