I have had a Support.com subscrition for 4 months so far and finally I had a support issue where I needed technical help. I called them yesterday and after getting a quasi-apologetic voice telling me they were busier than expected I waited on hold for a support engineer for well over an hour. Tried again this morning. Same result. I actually tried calling on my cell phone while on hold and this time I actually got a person to answer. She, too, apologized, saying that they are trying to hire some support engineers—or did she say "more support engineers? She gave me a ticket number and placed me on hold. And 10 minutes later my cell phone call was dropped. I tried their "Chat" with pretty much the same result: not exactly on hold but absolutely no response! I then started searching and found lots of complaints by support.com customers with similar complaints that were quite recent. So it became clear that I wasn't about to get any tech support from them in any realistic time frame. I also noticed some people trying to cancel their subscriptions but running into a catch-22: You can cancel only by calling them at the same number where they don't answer!
I found the company's address in Redwood City CA and checked their corporate registration. I sent them a fax noting that collecting money for services that you are not able to deliver is a species of consumer fraud, but inviting them to have a support engineer call me—if they really meant to provide technical support. Here's the strange part: My fax machine reported transmission errors each time I tried to fax my letter. Yet within the hour I got a series of e-mails from support.com "confirming" my subscription cancellation and refunding the monthly payments I had made. So I guess I'm not out anything, except my time and expectations. Of course my computer problem hasn't been solved either.
But I am astonished that an outfit of this sort could possibly be this derelict. Their website seems to show that they have resolved a lot of problems—in the past. Did all their support engineers quit? Are they on strike? Is there some huge demand for tech support that I am unaware of but which is nevertheless swamping them and everybody else in the business? And if youk are having a temporary problem and are such brilliant computer people, can you figure a way to let people know? Having them wait on hold for hours wondering what the %^& is happening until they get fed up is not a model for an effective hi-tech problem solving business. If you can't solve your problems—or give us some useful information about why you are temporarily (I hope) offline—how are you going to fix my problems?
Trust me, telling me that you are experiencing longer-than-usual wait times is no answer.
0 comments