We all know that customer service is key. I’ve beaten up on many companies over the years when, in my view, service levels dropped below the threshold of acceptability or when someone’s language skills descended into the depths of incomprehensibility. Of late, Dell has been one my targets.
That’s why it’s so refreshing to regale a vendor with kudos for customer service performed expertly. The beneficiary of my admiration today is Symantec.
After receiving a copy of Norton 360 from Symantec’s public-relations agency, I decided to install it on the PCs in my home office, a place where I spend far too much time. First, I uninstalled every last shred of the McAfee software that had caused horrible problems for nearly 18 months. To finish the removal, I delved into the registry and removed every last entry containing the word McAfee.
Next, I installed Norton 360. Smooth sailing. But then problems appeared. The annoying Norton bar in my browser continually noted that my machine was unprotected. It suggested that I click the “fix” button to immediately, well, fix the problem. Alas, clicking the button did nothing. I clicked again and again. I clicked harder and harder. Nothing.
That’s when I shot off an online help request to Symantec’s 24 x 7 support team. Within seconds, a window popped up with Rajesh ready to conduct a live chat and solve the problem. I can read English perfectly, so this was a whole lot better than a phone conversation.
Rajesh asked for permission to take over control of my PC. I downloaded and installed an Active-X control that gave him the power. Now, I sat back and watched as he reproduced the problem and checked registry entries. After 15 minutes he informed me that he would need to completely uninstall and reinstall the software. That process included a couple of reboots, which, thanks to the Active-X control, re-established the session with him each time.
An hour later, everything was running perfectly. And it still is. Curiously, system performance is now a lot perkier.
I’m impressed by how Symantec handled the situation and how it was resolved quickly and expertly — on the first try. I’ve had other customer support situations where, after two years, I’m still waiting for the vendor to get back to me. That network hardware vendor’s name I’ll not reveal.
And that brings me to your customer support structure. Do phone calls get answered quickly? Are e-mail messages responded to? Is there follow through to guarantee the problem was solved to the customer’s satisfaction? Do you ask the customer to rate the experience? Woe unto you if any one of these is not done, for it’s much more expensive to find a new customer than it is to keep a current one.
We could all learn a little from Symantec.
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It's great to see a company
It's great to see a company pay attention to its customers like Symantec does. I have a very similar experience as yours with Symantec (ironically, after I called Dell and they could not get it right. I just called Symantec instead and they fixed it super quickly!).Hi Joel, This is Vijay, I'm
Hi Joel,This is Vijay, I'm a Supervisor with Symantec Chat Support. I have planned to appreciate the technician who had assisted you. But, I was not able to trace your chat session. I'd appreciate if you could me with the details of the chat session you had? Any details like, the E-mail ID with which you had contacted us, chat Id that was provide to you, date in which you had contacted us.
This should help me a lot.
Thanks,
Vijay
Concluding that Symantec's
Concluding that Symantec's tech support operation "gets it right"as an extrapolation from one incident where the solution was a
reinstall of the software makes for a pretty weak article.
First, uninstalling and reinstalling a package is usually the first
recommendation by any software support representative. For the
inexerienced, having an analyst remotely connect to your PC and
perform the steps may seem pretty cool, but Dell and other tech
support organizations have been doing that for years.
Second, the comment posted by the Supervisor with Symantec Chat
Support, 'Vijay', hints at a major problem behind the scenes at
Symantec's tech support system. They either don't have or don't
use a comprehensive issue tracking system. I also suspect that
the names used in the chat sessions are anonymizing screen names,
not true identifiers.
My experience with Norton Antivirus tech support over the last
week convinced me of that even before I read this article.
After updating from NAV 2007 to NAV 2008, when I got tired of
ignoring prompts from NAV2007 to do so, I opened a chat session
with Symantec support. NAV 2008 didn't recognize my valid
License Key and LiveUpdate ran for hours while dominating my
CPU (95% CPU usage for up to 7.5 hrs).
I was told to run the Norton Removal Tool and then reinstall
NAV 2008. I did so, and this corrected the License Key issue,
but not the LiveUpdate problem.
I initiated another chat session, giving the case no. from the
first one, and after remotely connecting to my PC, the analyst
asked me to wait while the issue was passed to someone more
experienced. I waited an hour and a half, then closed the
chat window and resumed my life.
Despite the fact that I provided an e-mail address and phone
number before opening the chat session, I've never been
contacted to follow-up that lapse.
The next day I opened another chat session and the analyst
asked me to stay online for a transfer to a Case Manager, after
I described the situation. Another analyst took over quickly
and after remotely connecting to my PC, spent 5 hrs trying to
diagnose and correct my LiveUpdate problem. However, after
the 3rd or 4th reboot, the connection tool indicated that its
registration key had expired and I was left with no way to
reconnect with that analyst. Apparently the analyst also had
no way to reconnect with me, despite the e-mail address and
phone number I provided when initiating the chat session.
I opened another chat session and asked to be reconnected to
the analyst I'd been working with, but I was told that this
analyst couldn't "find the records' of my previous chats.
I allowed this analyst to remotely connect to my PC. I told
the analyst that LiveUpdate (the problem) wasn't currently
running, but if we started it the remote connection would be
heavily impacted. The analyst looked around, mentioned that
NAV 2008 displayed a green check mark indicating all was okay,
and then went on to try to convince me that resource usage
by LiveUpdate was entirely normal. His supervisor apparently
agreed with him. I opened a window on my desktop with the
transcript from a previous chat, but this analyst seemed to
not be interested in reading it (the scroll bar didn't move).
I told the analyst he was wasting my time and I terminated
the remote session and the chat session.
I've since contacted Symantec via e-mail, described my tech
support experience to date and asked for 2nd or 3rd tier
support, but thus far I'm unimpressed by the response. I'm
about to go looking for a replacement for my Antivirus.