Gosh darn it…

Customer Service is one of the most important things for businesses… It doesn’t mean the customer is always right, but it does mean that you try to solve the customers issues…

Quite a few months ago, I was going around in circles with customer support representatives for a certain tax company, and I finally got part of it resolved… But it looks like, I will be forced to manually re-enter all of my 2007 tax information… (fun! ^ the n-th degree)

This company has several issues that prevent useful email support.

1. The emails that are sent to the customer have no way to replied to, other than returning to the web form that you submitted the inital problem report.  Why is this a problem?  Because there is no way to hold a conversation.
2. The customer representative know this, and seem to assume that they understand the problem, or throw the closest documentation they can find at the problem.  For example, I needed to export my 2007 records to a “.tax” file, so the customer representative just sent me the documentation to export the 2008 records to a tax file.  The next representative gave me instructions to search the hard drive for .tax files, when I clearly stated that I used the web based tax software (eg no .tax file on hard drive).
3. When a customer includes a previous ticket number in their email, please read the previous ticket!  They included it for a reason.  Several of these email exchanges could have been avoided if they had read the previous tickets…
4. I have been using this companies product for at least 7+ years, this is the first time that I seen anything about being able to export the web based data….  Why the heck does the company not offer that when they offer the option to print or save the records in PDF form?
5. The companies knowledge base is filled with seemingly conflicting data, and it’s search features are extremely poor.  It only seems to perform a title search, and even then it’s a very narrow search.  In this day where anyone can embed a Google search engine into their web page, why do we have  to settle for search engines that this poor.?

I suspect that this will be the last year that I use this companies product…  Not because of the tax issue that started this customer service request, that was a stupid mistake on my part, but because it’s been such a chore to work through their idea of a customer support.

I have done Computer help desk support, I currently am a level 3 Help Desk Specialist, and deal with odd issues all day.  I dislike spending 4 days trying to get my own records, and failing…