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Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Tech support is going downhill. With Voice over IP (VoIP) able to bridge countries around the world under the banner of Company X, customer experience is no longer as important as companies bottom dollar. Dell was the first large computer technology company to outsource its support years ago and now it seems everyone uses India or Pakastan as its main source for tech support. What a shame.
I have dealt with so many frustrating calls to these two countries that I now no longer purchase support contracts due to the uselessness of them. If I can’t understand the person on the other end of the phone, what good does it do me? Thankfully, AppleCare does care and the only out-of-country tech I have ever spoke to was someone in Canada. That works. But all the others ones, fuh getta ’bout it.
Case in point, Intuit. Last week I finally broke down and had my intern contact the makers of Quicken and TurboTax to help us with an on going problem that we have had for six months with our QuickBooks Pro 2006 program. Alex got someone in India and sure enough he had a difficult time communicating with her. One hour later, he hung up with no real solution and performed her suggestion that we both knew the result would be the same. It was.
A second lengthy call provided the response, “Wait until your next bank statement and it will correct itself out.” Even though we were under the same impression back in March and had not seen any correction occur since then, we humored the India tech and did so. Yesterday we got our statement and performed the task. No correction.
We called for the third time and two hours later we were told to just make a balance adjustment, something we had discussed before paying Intuit $75 for a month of service. When we asked what kind of effect this would have on our next reconciliation, we were told, “I don’t know.” Great tech support, Intuit!
Instead of waiting another month to see if this trick would work, I had my intern reverse the latest reconciliation and perform the adjustment the day prior to the end of statement. He then reperformed the reconciliation and presto, fixed! Again, something we had come up on our own as a solution prior to wasting time and money on Intuit. We too had the same presumption of the final outcome if we would perform this fix as Intuit. So how could Intuit claim “expert” support to us?
In the end we learned a valuable lesson. We will never purchase tech support from Intuit again and we will inform as many people as we can about this problem. Through this blog as well as through word of mouth. You’ve been warned.
August 22nd, 2006 at 13:18
Intuit is one of the least customer friendly software companies around. Their Mac products are a ripoff plain and simple.
August 22nd, 2006 at 13:28
I called once for support, and realized the person was reading me word for word the manual. Big help. Intuit is by far my least favorite software company to deal with, especially as a Mac user.
August 22nd, 2006 at 14:04
I forgot to point out that even after telling us previousily that we had to wait for our next bank statement, which we did and then applied for August, the tech support rep then told us after our problem still existed, “Have you applied your September statement?” September? What calendar are they on in India?! It’s still two weeks before September!!
The whole office was laughing at this point. Classic!
August 23rd, 2006 at 6:28
I have all of my Mac clients on Accountedge by MYOB. Great product! They’ve been on the Mac for over a decade (unlike intuit who comes and goes) and has support local in NJ.