Nov 21 2007
Why I hate Symantec
Although this incident ended well, it took far too long to resolve.
I use Norton AntiVirus, the subscription to which expires every year around this time, but renewing it this year was just a huge hassle. There is a link to their renewal site on the web, but the link does not include the product you are renewing, you have to look it up and enter it by hand. The list of product names they have on their website does not exactly match the product name I use, so I had to guess which one on their list was the one I had. Then you fill out this form, give them your credit card number, and they email you an order confirmation. This is where things got frustrating.
The email confirmation said that I need to enter the subscription key/renewal code into the Norton software to renew it. But the email I received did not contain the renewal code. I poke around in several place, but can’t find it. So I go to their support website, and it says the fastest way to get support is to do a web chat with an analyst. So I click on the chat link, and it informs me that it does not work with Fireforx. So I open up Internet Explorer, go to the support website, click on the chat link, and it wants to download Symantec chat software. So I download and install the chat software, and now the download process informs me that I have to reboot my computer. Now I’m pissed - this is taking way too long.
But I reboot my computer, fire up IE, go to the Symantec support website, click on the chat link, and then wait around 5 minutes for a support analyst to show up. An analyst named Sanjeev finally shows up. Fortunately, his written English is just fine and there are no language issues. He asks me a bunch of questions, some of them irrelevant (like what kind of internet connection do I have), but he does renew my subscription on Symantec’s servers without requiring me to enter the still missing renewal code. So it ended well, but start to finish this took around an hour and I have neither time nor patience to mess with stuff like this.
It’s this kind of crap that drives customers to competitors.
Better than my experience. I installed Goback, it caused a conflict with a hard drive and I had to use knoppix to recover the drive.
Tried for 2 days to get rid of goback, didn’t work. Downloaded their removal tool, no joy, finally got on chat. Their tech established a virtual connection with my machine, played with it for an hour, edited the registry, changed my msconfig file and then told me I was good. Signed off, problem still there, plus all kinds of conflicts due to drivers not loading at startup since he changed my config file and my onboard sound would not work.
I got an email with a customer survey, flamed them, clearly said the problem was not resolved and heard nothing more.
Got on the same thing next night, same routine, but after two hours their tech almost had it all done so he left me instructions on what to do after he signed off, which included registry edits. He also downloaded a newer version to my machine and told me to install it, which I did the next day. I figured it was a version not requiring a key since he didn’t give me one. Installed and promptly got an error message asking for a key, which I don’t have. I tried my older version key, which is still good since it was only installed for a short time, but that didn’t work.
Now, somewhere along the way chat no longer works. IE downloads the file, installs it, but never brings up a chat window. I had to resort to email tech support, which has the lightning fast reply time of 96 hours. Been two days now, so I guess I still have 2 to go.
Once this subscription expires I will never again use Norton.