I recently started a thread about Nikon's very lacking tech support. It is at http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1176229. Hope that will work -- for background.

Anyway I am on a rant about all of this. It actually is pretty funny, looking back. It seems that Nikon is certainly not alone in providing terrible tech support.

Anyway I returned the camera I talked about in the previous post to the National Camera Exchange and replaced it with one from Adorama, this time an 800E. At the same time I updated my Corel Painter to Painter 12 and my laptop to a quad-core i7 Asus. I know, I know, but it's only money.

Then my new Painter 12 started crashing during auto-painting, so (yeah, I know) I e-mailed Corel technical support, after receiving an e-mail from them thanking me for purchasing the upgrade and making me aware that with it I would have 90-days of free technical support. So I filed a case. A guy emailed me back saying he had been assigned the case and asking me a couple of basic questions. I answered back, and in the following eight days I have received nothing more from Corel. Imagine my surprise. Probably should call myself lucky, though. In the interim I have emailed back asking if anybody was there. No reply.

I then thought that perhaps there was something going on with the new Asus that was causing the problem and a couple other glitches. One glitch was that a WiUSB driver was not working. So I called Asus. After another long, barely decipherable conversation with a person, obviously at a call center outside the US, that support guy finally told me to just uninstall the driver and "not worry about it." And, no, he had no idea about the Painter problem. That was obviously a software problem.

I also had the "opportunity" (tongue in cheek) to talk with HP support, to find out why my wireless connection to my HP laser printer had suddenly gone belly up. Again I was transferred several times to different HP tech support people, all obviously outside the USA. Each time they would apparently read from scripts aimed at leading me through a reinstall process. I would ask a question, and there would be no response, only quiet. Finally they would be back with the next step. Each time the wireless connection would not reinstall, and the support person would then say that actually they did not work with my model of printer and then would transfer me to another center. Then we would go through the same process again and again with the same result. Anyway I am now connected via USB cable with that printer and calling it good.

Oh yeah, one more. When my refund for the original camera did not go through for several days, I tried to track it thru my bank, Bank of America. I was transferred from customer (dis)service to a fraud department and then on to a billing disputes department. Nobody could find anything about the deposit into my account, either "pending" or otherwise, that National Camera Exchange said it made. What was most disconcerting was that each of the three people I talked with spoke, again, with a hard-to-understand foreign accent. I mean, my God, this was Bank of America. This effort on my part was made close to a week after the refund had supposedly been sent. The only answer I got was that the matter could be pursued if the refund did not show up within 15 days. 15 days!! The refund did get to me the next day.

I had not had the pleasure of speaking with any tech support people for a long time. Interesting to learn that not much has changed. ;o)

Well I can't help you in any of those circumstances, except about the bank, try a credit union out. My CU is nice, you only need to press one button to speak with a live person at the bank. In fact one time I had to call back the next day and I got the same lady and she recognized my voice, that was nice.

Switch to a Mac.

DontShoot wrote:
Switch to a Mac.

Word.

DontShoot suggested, "Switch to a Mac."

Smile, when ya say that, Mister.

Actually I've had several of both PCs and Macs, and, you know what, they all did the job.

Not looking for answers. I've managed to find workable solutions. I was only laughing at, so to speak, the continued sorry state of technical support in general. I will admit, though, that in my experience Apple has provided very good tech support, certainly by comparison.

I work in IT for a living, so I deal with all kinds of technical support. Consequently, when I find a good support experience, it tends to make me loyal to the brand.

Lenovo's support of my ThinkPad has been nothing short of exceptional, and all US based that I've experienced, so they've managed to make me a loyal customer until they screw it up.

Cisco has excellent business support as well though most consumers don't have the occasion to use them.

I think the short-sightedness of cutting costs through outsourcing or reducing technical support is amazing. It's so easy to make someone form an immediate and personal warm feeling about your brand by supporting them when something goes wrong. Tech support isn't a direct money-maker, though, so companies tend to use it as a place where they can save on personnel costs.

Danner wrote:
DontShoot wrote:
Switch to a Mac.

Word.

No...Pages

As a business owner that refunds credit cards every so often, we actually tell our customers "you should see your refund in 2-3 days, although Bank of America and some debit cards may take much longer". Seems they keep all the refunds in their account for a while, swipe a little interest or something.

I've pretty much talked myself out of a new HD tv because I don't want to have to deal with installation. A couple of years ago, they sent me a new cable box. Tiny thing, about 6 inches square. Worked fine then died. No amount of waving dead chickens or magic signs would revive it. Man from Comcast comes with a new box that won't work. After 2 more boxes that refuse to work, he just sets up a box just like the one Comcast said they were replacing a year earlier. That, or wait until MOnday when he gets new boxes from the supply center. The big black box works, and I figure HDTV isn't on the horizon.

I try calling Comcast to see if the big black box is compatible with HDTV, but whenever I call, it's a 30 minute wait. Will my big black box work? I don't know. I have a local office a few blocks away, but there is always a line out the door. If I buy a new TV will I end up with a 700 dollar boat anchor?

The cable box will have a make and a model number on it somewhere.
Write it down and then google it.
Unless of course they left you a manual for the cable box.
An HD cable box should also have a HDMI cable connection.

Hey Garth,

Man... what a crazy week(s) of dealing with tech support. We get very myopic in our view towards Nikon, but as you demonstrated quite well this is not just a Nikon problem, but a global corporate issue... Most companies have cut their operating costs to the bare bones, and in general, as long as they keep selling whatever it is they make, they really don't seem to care about tech support as I guess in their mind they aren't making any money of it...

Well... now the only thing I see you should have done different was to have videod all these various interactions. Putting that into one video that you could have put up on Youtube, I am sure it would have gone viral...

Jim

Switch to Mac, Adobe, Canon, and Wells Fargo. Be happy and lower your blood pressure.

In reply to JimFox, yeah Jim, that's exactly what I was summing up. It was just a strange four or five days that took me back about a decade or two to when I really could get locked into trying to find solutions to these glitches that could really make some products close to if not outright unusable. I would, similarly, spend hours on the line with technical support in an even more frustrating manner. This last week, when I found myself seemingly heading down that unending road once again, I realized this deja vu moment for what it was and just laughed it off.

What has gotten better, it seems, is the products themselves. They simply work better, and there are doable workarounds to a lot of those glitches. My second Nikon body focuses just fine. I can autoclone in a different manner in Corel Painter just fine. My HP printer works very well via USB cable, etc. Maybe I've gotten a little better, too. ;o).

James R wrote:
Switch to Mac, Adobe, Canon, and Wells Fargo. Be happy and lower your blood pressure.

Having dealt with products and customer service from Apple, Adobe, Canon and Wells Fargo, I'd say that's a pretty rose-tinted view of the world.

Wells Fargo was a single instance, so I'm willing to give them a pass on what might have been a one time problem. Idiots and mediocre products abound in the other three, though. That's not really a specific dig on any of them, but they are definitely right around the status quo for the rest of the industry.