[Grrr...] Is Tech Support Designed to Enrage You? - Comments Page 3

Excellent customer support: Navy Federal Credit Union, Cox Cable for TV, Internet & Phone and Consumer Cellular at least in my experience in south east Virginia. My daughter lives in northern Virginia and has had horrible experience with Verizon as does my neighbor across the street. My experience with Dell & HP mirrors most of the other comments, I'd rather get a root canal.

I agree with Joe about eBay - they don't care anything for customers and don't care if their top sellers defraud, cheat and lie.

We have a local exclusive distributor for one of the world's largest coordinate measuring machine manufacturers. Not only is their customer service virtually non-existent, their reputation is that you have to indicate that you are planning a major purchase to get a response. We pay for an annual software maintenance agreement for support but yet they cannot and will not support the software as they no longer have any employees who even know how to use the software. My most recent contacts asking for quotes for purchases have not even received any replies.

Acronis is currently driving me crazy. But the real beauty is LastPass! It took one and a half years before I got to a level 3 dispute and in one email all problems were solved. Before that I was jumping through hoops. The level 3 tech told me that the LastPass download gives you the wrong installation file! He gave me a link to what he called the "binary installation file". When I installed that everything was perfect! To quote my grandmother, "Oy Vay!.

One company that has excellent tech support is Dashlane password manager. I had a problem with the manager working with Chrome, and contacted tech support via email. Although it took 2 weeks to solve the problem (don't know if it was Chrome problem or Dashlane's) they worked with me constantly over that period of time offering many different solutions until the problem was solved. If you need a password manager I highly recommend Dashlane.

This article explains alot. Lifetime Playon claims they'll DVR online steaming networks. Called tech support because Hulu wouldn't record. 1st of all, I don't use Internet Explorer, Java, And didn't have Adobe Flash installed on my windows 7 computers. Tech support told me IF I enabled and used IE and Flash, Hulu could be recorded. Computer Backup time. This was after a 20 minute wait time. Total support time was about 45 minutes.
Needless to say I had my suspicions as to whether their suggestions would work. They didn't. I don't intend to call them again. I dropped Hulu+ with no commercials anyway because they'd switch to online networks for many shows and then forced me to watch commercials. When I could watch those shows without Hulu. Revealing article, Bob.

I have had nothing but excellent experience with Tech Support of U.S. corporations like Microsoft and Symantec as well as with Internet service and cellular providers in Israel.

I assume that the reason that I never experienced "Tech support rage" is that I do not live in the U.S. Hence, when I called Microsoft Support with really difficult problems, I talked to local computer geeks who were very knowledgeable and liked challenges rather than to someone in India with minimal knowledge and unintelligible accent.

It is amazing that Americans have to wait hours on line in order to talk to a human. I strongly recommend that you adopt a simple law we have in Israel:

If you call Customer Service and do not get a response from a human after THREE MINUTES, the service provider is required by law to let you leave a phone number and Customer Service has to call you back within three hours. This really works!

One salient point not mentioned thus far is the first nerve-grating introduction--namely the "music" played over the phone while I am on hold..............high pitched soprano saxophones and loud flutes dazzle and destroy the eardrum as you wait thru annoncements of "you are very important to us, etc"--this "music" is fully intended to drive you off right from the get-go---
and it seems the grainier, more broken up, and obnoxious sound you must listen to while waiting...the better the Tech company likes it!!!

Hi Bob. Good topic. I try to follow most of your suggestions. One in particular is getting the back up system iDrive and iDrive One. I am not a very techy person but the concept of the iDrive sounded good. My dealings with tech support from iDrive have less than satisfying. They are not very patient with my questions. ( I have Parkinson's Disease and have trouble expressing myself clearly at times which could be the problem) I am looking for a website that will give me step by step in easy to understand instructions. Any suggestions?

I recently spent a lot of time trying to exchange an unwanted smartphone from Net10 for a basic telephone as a result of their upgrade to 4G service. I ended up writing a letter to the company. Now I have a basic telephone with my old phone number. Keep on fighting until you get what you need.

Their phone reps were very polite but they kept saying they weren't authorized to do what I needed.

Two issues in one for me here. In hindsight some of this makes sense but you get to a point where you distrust what customer service tell you. I was having an email problem which I now know is due to Outlook, Windows Live Mail and at the back end Microsoft themselves. Two days ago I instigated a chat with Microsoft's Answer Tech folks. Did the usual self help stuff they give you, took remote control and the outcome was to change my Outlook password as "there seems to be an issue with that". If you have ever had to do that MS say it can take up to 72 hours for the change to be effective (why?). Suffice to say there was no difference and I could not sign in at all. Ok, back to Answer Tech and repeated the process. Again, remote control, they checked settings and all the stuff the had "resources" for but could not find an answer. A couple of hours later I try again. Give them a previous case reference number. This time they suggest an IE 11 reinstall plus a reinstall of the Bing bar (where I could not access mail from). I told them I had done this but they suggest we do it again and everything will be fine. Of course we do this and it makes no difference. In short 7 Answer Tech guys later, I get a guy who does a sfc/scannow check, checks the DIMS, looks in the Windows Event Logs, does a reboot and I lose the connection to him. Each one has a different approach to the issue and a different way of trying to help. All maintain that they are doing this for my good and each has told me they will have a resolution. Each one without fail has said Windows 10 will fix everything and each one has tried to sell me a service package. I understand why they do this and it is part of their job. All were polite and gave the impression that they knew what they were doing and that they cared, but the ultimate aim is to upgrade to Office 365 and various other goodies. Bearing in mind this happened in the last couple of days, the final Answer Tech guy sends me this link which I am sure will help others if they have this same problem

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Windows-Live-Mail-2012-will-not-connect-to-Outlook-com-45453b92-373b-4bbb-88ca-f8ec74f8e8fd

I can't see a date other than 2016, when this notice was issued but my point is that this must have been known to Microsoft's Tech teams. Answer Tech guys 1 through 7 had no idea as this really is the problem I was / am having. How come Answer Tech guy 8 knows this..........he had done some other remote stuff before he magically found this link. I knew that some Outlook stuff was migrating to other platforms starting end of June 2016, but why do MS allow their customers to have no knowledge of something that will affect how their systems run without making some provision for those of us who are happy with the systems that we have. I simply don't believe that their could not have been a workaround or patch that could have let email users just carry on as they were. You have to be cynical and suggest it is MS gearing up to make more money when they want you to spend, rather than when you might want to upgrade to newer, but not necessarily better, systems. Just to say that because I could not get my mail from the mail icon on the Bing bar, I just went to Outlooklive.com where all my mail is, and just bookmarked it and added it to the favorites bar, and I now have an email icon where I can get my Outlook mail from. Shame none of these people suggested this to me.
As you can tell from the article, the problem I have, and I suspect loads of others will have is true, but something tells me that it might be something else, but I have wasted enough of my time , and I would suggest the time of MS's tech teams, so I will just have to live with a non working mail icon on Bing, and an error message on WLM telling me they can't connect to Windows Library Calendar Service, unless of course someone has a solution to this.

Regards Dan

Bank of America Mastercard. Don't get one. If you have a problem they will go out of their way to discourage you from getting any kind of assistance.

A friend of mine made the mistake of getting DirectTV service. She live in the boonies and a satellite dish was the only way for her to get TV. The installer was polite but neglected to bury the cable from the dish to the trailer, didn't bury the pole holding the dish any more than a foot!! In bare dirt!! Plus, she got a used, outdated converter. Several calls to DirectTV got her a headache from hell and it took threats of a lawsuit to get those B@^%$rds to fix things, after six months. There was a incentive to opt for DirectTV that promised a $200 rebate(?) if she opted for certain packages. She's tried to get the money due her OR get rid of the 'prime package' she doesn't want; a sh&#load of BS that I wouldn't look at if you paid me. I listened to her go round-n-round with clueless oblivits who read from a script and promise they'll see to it. 'It' what? Maybe some folks have a good experience with Direct TV - good on them. I wish them a spot in Tech Experience Heaven. G'day.

I have had a simple AmericanExpress Green card since 1976. I don't own any credit cards and pay my AX bill at the end of the month, If I can't afford to buy an item by then, I will not buy it until I can afford to pay cash (or AX) for it.
In the past 40 years, I would have to say that there has never been one single time that AX CustomerSupport (CS) did not quickly resolve any issue I've had with retailers.
My experience may be against all odds and isolated, but these are the types of companies I like doing business with.
There are still plenty of fish in the water to gravitate to those companies that provide good CS!

Believe it or not, I have received excellent customer service from AT&T on several occasions, but mostly only on issues of billing and changes to my plan. They are less helpful with technical issues. With anything they can possibly attribute to the iPhone itself there is rarely a satisfactory outcome, though occasionally they do come through.