Computerworld has an interview with Symantec CEO John Thompson, which discusses, among other things, the poor customer service the company has been dishing out lately. Apparently, it took hold times of over an hour for the anti-virus giant to realize something had to be done.
In answer to the question, “Have you sufficiently addressed related customer service issues and long telephone waits?” Thompson replies: “We think we have by overstaffing, but that’s not a sustainable model, so we have to fix the technology underpinnings… Wait times from their peak of well over an hour are down to now under two minutes.”
Interestingly enough, Symantec is the maker of the most popular anti-virus software, Norton Anti-Virus. For a company that prides itself in protecting your computer and staying up-to-date on the latest threats out there, how much trust does it deserve if it can’t manage its own infrastructure? I’m betting that keeping tabs on all the viruses in the world is a harder job than making sure your customer service is decent. But maybe not. Either way, I like the security company I choose to do both well!
It is my experience that all commercial software companies have crap support. What do you really get when you buy a $400 copy of Windows Vista or a $800 package of Adobe’s CS3 suite? Pretty much nada
Yeah, that’s been my experience too… But the “everyone’s doing it” argument doesn’t make me feel any better about it.