Symantec NAV Saga: The Third & Final Episode

Last month I blogged about my second episode with Symantec's Norton Anti Virus (NAV) support. At the time I was to recontact their technical support in about a week's time. The season being what it is I did not get to schedule the 1-2 hours that this contact will require until about a month later. As I logged in to Symantec's chat, I was quite confident that with this extra time the brilliant people at NAV would have found a solution to the issue.

I completed once again the pre-session form, dutifully entered the case number given to me, and when I finally had "Analyst Mamta" joining my chat room, here is how that conversation went, literally:

Mamta> Could you please elaborate the issue for me?

Me> I guess your case file did not include info on what your 2 previous colleagues did with me over 2 sessions of couple of hours each?

Mamta> I'm trying to look for the information.

Me> In the last session I was told that Symantec did not have a solution for this and had escalated the issue. I was asked to re-contact you in a week's time. It has been a month since. Is there any new information from the party it was escalated to?

Mamta> Please confirm if you have worked on this issue with a case manager.

Me> I don't know if the previous 2 "analysts" that worked with me on this are "case managers" or not.

Mamta> It looks like you have contacted us multiple times about this and it’s still not resolved. I’d like to transfer you to a Case Manager who will study this case and investigate further possible solutions. Is that okay with you?

At that stage it became clear to me that there was no recording of information in the case file and hence no hope for progress on resolving my problem, so I asked for a refund. I was told that for a refund I needed to contact Symantec's customer service (CS), again chat only unless you pay for their time!

Long story short, I connected by chat again to "Radhika" of Customer Service (Returns). She asks me again what the issue is; have I re-installed the product; am I getting error messages etc. Thirty minutes into that conversation Radhika asks to connect remotely to my machine. I feel the need to reiterate that I am using a Mac and Firefox browser, to which she then states "I am not dealing with Mac operating system". If I needed any further proof that no case file of any significance exists, that was it!

Now I am transferred to "Analyst Lakshmikant" who of course starts by asking me all the same questions again! To shorten the process, I actually copied segments from my blog on the second episode describing what his colleagues already tried and sent them over chat line. Finally, he recommends that I completely remove and re-install the software (the fourth time in this process!). As I have to leave to my next appointment by then, he provides me with the instructions to do so and we agree that he'll call me by phone next day at 11:30 am EST to check that everything went as planned. Next day I spend an hour following his steps and waiting for his call. To add insult to injury, no one calls me at all.

So tonight I took the time to connect once again with this wonderful organization. It took half an hour and two representatives until I was promised an email spelling out terms that once I agree to, would start the process of refund that usually takes "5 to 7 working days".

Needless to say that as of the time of this posting no such email has arrived. I am nominating Symantec as one of two finalists for the 2008 worst customer service experience. If you're curious about who the other finalist is, read subsequent posting in this blog.

The Symantec Support Saga (part 2)

Just a quick update on Symantec's handling of support for Norton Antivirus for Mac:

My second session had to start again through the WinXP machine, but got me an "analyst" online a bit faster than the first time (about 20 minutes waiting). I typed in my case number and the analyst took time to read through it. To my surprise he started asking me if the previous analyst had done this or that. I had to tell him about the previous session's actions!

As no new action for resolving the issue was being taken, I asked the new analysts again if my selecting of a Mac OS case sensitive file system might have anything to do with the problem. To my horror, he suggested that I "change the file system and try running NAV again" !!! I had to explain to him using NTFS as example, what the consequences would be if I followed his advice.

I was told that this being an unknow issue, I should contact them again in 4-5 days. I am really curious to see what escalation procedures they have over there! Stay tuned for the next episode.

An Open Letter to Symantec's Tech Support Manager

Dear Manager,

I have recently purchased your Norton Antivirus for Mac (version 10.0.1 (3)) for my MacBook Pro running Mac OS 10.4.11 on Intel processor. After installing it and using LiveUpdate I wanted to complete an initial full scan. Each time I started the manual scan of the entire hard drive (over 110 GB) the program immediately reported having completed the scan and found nothing.

You can appreciate my scepticism in this case. So I checked all the console, system, and crash logs for any signs of problems with your application. None was found. So I moved to searching your web support pages for some indications. I selected the product and version and got a list of the top asked questions, which of course did not include anything close to my problem. It did, however, include an invitation to contact a support person by chat. I was thrilled that you offered such immediate and free support and clicked on the link and guess what I got?

I can see your anticipating smile while you're reading this. The page I got informed me that I have to use a Microsoft IE 5.5 browser or higher to chat with your agent. Now I know that you are very busy and not able to follow up on browser news, but at least your web developers should know that Mac machines have long stopped using IE in favor of Safari or Firefox.

OK. So what to do now? I resigned myself to establishing contact through an older laptop that runs Windows XP and has your cherished IE. I filled in patiently your form and clicked to finally get someone to solve my problem, but your support application insisted that it must download it's auto-diagnostic application to my Windows machine, eventhough this is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand. What a wonderful logical design you have!

Now curious as to how bad it could get, I allowed the installation of your remote diagnostic. It opened then the chat interface in the default position "Full Control" of my Windows machine. There were 2 other options available: "Disable" and "View Only", but if you try to select either you get a warning that this will terminate your current support session.So much for customer choice and respect of privacy.

This was about an hour ago. Since then I have been waiting for your "analyst" to join me in the chat room and address my issue. The only things displayed is a periodic message in red saying "We are experiencing higher than usual service times. Please wait and an analyst will be with you shortly". I have now 6 of those wonderfully informative messages on the interface.

Well the time invested in Symantec support is not fully wasted. I have written this blog while waiting and I just wanted to share my lovely experience with you. Oh! Wait, here comes the analyst.

First action is to direct my Mac browser to a Symantec page and give me a PIN to access a similar remote support application to the one I had to endure on my Windows laptop. Once connected he asked and got control of my Mac. He repaired some file permissions using the disk utility, then uninstalled and reinstalled the anti-virus application (I could have told him that I already tried that). The result was obviously the same! He tried to reboot my Mac remotely, but the iChat session prevented him from doing so. I had to do it manually, which meant I lost the remote session to Symantec and had to contact you again via the Windows laptop to get a new PIN for reconnecting the Mac. The second run consisted of downloading through FTP a patch for the Stuffit component in NAV for Mac V.10 (My version is 11 and it's unclear to me why the installation files of my version didn't have the right Stuffit version in the first place). Another reboot and reconnection episode and the end result was still the same.

I had spent at that point over 2 hours on this and was running late for an appointment. So we concluded this session with a case number for me to reconnect with support.

I was not able to reconnect until 48 hours later. Believe it or not we do have a few things to do that are more important than spending hours with your online support. Back into the WinXP session. This time I only waited about half an hour to get an "analyst". He is now reviewing the case and I am wondering how long this is going to take again.

Would you be surprised if I told you that I am not a fan of Symantec any more based on my user experience? I recommend you get out of your shell and experience yourself what your customers are going through. It helps a lot!

Sincerely,
NH