Wesley Howe

One of the things I like about established products is the opportunity to get anything wrong corrected. Part of the social contract is that I pay my money, and I get something that works correctly. Generally, this is an implied warrant of merchantability. You should get what you pay for.

Today, we are going to single out one company, McAfee, for being tone deaf to customer needs. I wanted to just fill out a form and report a bug. The bug is that every time I restart, McAfee Total Protection insists on creating a desktop icon. I have a perfectly useful icon in the system tray, so I don’t need another one on the desktop. If you delete it, don’t worry, it will come back at the next restart.

So I went to their website, there the only email service option is “customer service”. However, it is mislabelled, as you don’t get any service there. I just got instructions on how to get a live chat with a technician. The message is clear. “Can’t you read, you must not bother me”, although the words are polite.

So I took the time to use the technical chat. This process starts with downloading and running their virtual technician program. That did not go so well, it was unable to scan my computer. I would wonder if my anti-virus program interfered, but either way they look like fools, because they wrote my anti-virus program. The lack of technical ability so far is quite evident, and could hardly inspire one to an increase in confidence.

So I had to type my report into the system, and open a “GoTo Assist” window, which was another download and installation. That worked, and a proud technician named “Divya” proceeded to say hello and ask me what I needed. Obviously, what I typed at the start of the session is either not passed along or was ignored. So I explain again (now, this is the third explanation). After a short bit he proceeded to tell me that it was a known issue they were addressing.

I asked to open a ticket, he would not do that, just repeated that the engineers would fix it and it would be in an update. So here is my summary of the process:

• You,  the customer, are a useless entity except when you are paying additional sums of money.
• You, the computer user, cannot be relied on to make an observation, you must use our virtual technician that does not even work.
• Customer Service does not mean you are entitled to any real service; if you want to report a problem, don’t talk to us, chat with a technician.

Does no one care about what the customers think? Or are they just a time wasting entity that have nothing better to do than call in and complain about problems. I guess they expect that eventually they will get the customers trained so that they expect the little they are going to get.