I Don't Think Doc Searls Is Ever Going to Pay Another Cent to Quicken
He writes:
The Doc Searls Weblog : Tuesday, August 30, 2005: Customer Relationship Mismanagement: My accountant has been on the phone, mostly on hold, for 20 minutes (so far) trying to get Quicken to give her the info she needs to restore her copy of QuickBooks after the program disabled itself for want of registration information that is in no obvious place and appears to require talking with a series of customer support personnnel in some other country over a bad phone connection. Now (half an hour later), a Quicken person is telling her she'll have to wait until tomorrow or later to get help recovering from the worsening of the situation, caused by an apparently incorrect registration number provided by an earlier "service" person.... At this point the customer service person was required to ask us to express our satisfaction with her performance, and then shunted us to an automated system that asked us two questions about this person's performance, but NOTHING about the hell we went through before we got to a person who could solve our problem.
The whole system is f*d up in so many ways I don't know where to begin, so I won't. I will say it's lame in the extreme for a CRM system to put the whole evaluation burden on one individual, rather than the hold-and-transfer chain that leads to that person. Total time wasted: one hour and ten minutes.
My sympathies. I won't ever pay another cent to Adobe after wasting an hour and a half on phone support because a screen said "Enter Go-Live serial number" when it should have said "Enter PageMill serial number." It would take a personal phone call from the COO before I would pay them another cent for anything.