Elgin Computer Guy

This is a story of the worst technical support I’ve ever experienced in my life. It’s no wonder everyone complains about the quality of technical support.

As a computer tech with 20+ years of experience, I thought I’d seen and heard it all when it comes to tech support horror stories. I’ve dealt with countless completely clueless “techs” on the phone and mostly managed to keep my cool. I’ve learned to deal with those who follow their scripts without understanding. Usually once all the scripted stuff doesn’t work, you can escalate to 2nd level support and start the real troubleshooting.

So a client was having trouble with a new installation of Quickbooks 2008. Intuit will give you 30 days of free support when you buy a new version, but this client has been using QB for some time and has a support contract with them. When my attempts at troubleshooting didn’t resolve the problem pretty quickly I decided to take advantage of their support contract and just call for an answer.

The first tech was much as expected - foreign accent and pleasant, but definitely troubleshooting “by the book”. I told him that yes, I’ve already applied the latest updates and tried repairing the installation. He then had me go into the control panel and wanted me to make some changes to the mouse settings. I told him that I would not turn on “click lock” on this poor unsuspecting woman’s machine and that I really didn’t think it would help.

He asked for permission and I told him I would be glad to let him connect to this computer to help me with reinstalling the application again. He decided to first try repairing it instead of uninstalling. I told him I had just finished doing that before I called, but if he thought it would work the 2nd time around to go ahead. It made no difference, so he said we would have to remove it and reinstall it.

He also suggested that possibly it had trouble reading the CD, so we should copy the installation files onto the local hard disk instead of running them from CD. We uninstalled the application, renamed a few directories and reinstalled. The same problem still existed. I asked if he would escalate me to 2nd level support. He politely obliged and told me that a technician would call be back “sometime after 1 hour”.

Once I got off the phone, I called back and gave my ticket number and asked to be transferred to 2nd level support. This time I got a woman who wanted me to start the whole process over again… She said she can’t be sure that he renamed the directory before reinstalling or not. By this time I was losing patience and suggested to her that she might get the answer to that question by asking me. I told her that it had been done and asked her what else we could do to resolve this problem. She asked if I’d tried running it in safe mode. Hmmm… Ok, I hadn’t tried safe mode. Maybe we’re onto something here.

I rebooted into safe mode and ran Quickbooks. Sure enough it worked. I asked the technician “OK, now what?” and the reply was something along the lines of “There is something wrong with your computer and we don’t help with computer problems. Obviously the computer is broken and needs to be repaired. Will there be anything else I can help you with today?” WHAT!?!! I asked to speak with her manager and after a short wait was told basically that they were done helping me and that I needed to talk to the IT guy to get him to fix the computer. After explaining that I am the IT guy and there is nothing wrong with this computer except that the upgrade they forced onto this customer won’t run properly on it, he again told me they’ve done everything they could.

I told him the only thing their techs had done was to have me reinstall the program and I pointed out that they never even asked about the error messages in the event logs. He said those event log entries are only for the programmers, not the technicians. I pointed out that there are specific messages about what is going on in those logs and if we could get a knowledgeable tech to look at them we might be able to figure out why it doesn’t work. He insisted that the error logs were only for the programmers and again said that they don’t support broken computers.

I told him that I expected them to help me solve the problem because everything else on the computer runs properly except their software and we’re paying them for tech support. He reminded me that it works in safe mode so the problem couldn’t be their software. I told him that it needs to work in normal mode, too and he replied “Well, it works on my computer, so obviously our software is fine.” My reply? “I can’t believe you just said that. You’re telling me that since the software works on your computer there’s no reason for it not to work on mine and you’re no longer going to help?” “That’s right. We don’t fix broken computers. Read your contract.”

When I told him that I was a consultant working with many companies using Quickbooks and that I would recommend to them all that they drop their support contracts, he seemed to agree that if we expected them to help out when the cause is obviously not their program that I should have them drop the support. “We don’t fix broken computers.”

Is that unbelievable or what? When it was all over one of the women in the office came over and said she heard the “Well it works on my computer.” She said that’s like calling your mechanic and he tells you “Well, I have a Mazda and it works fine so yours must be fine, too”.

So…. even though Quickbooks may be the standard in accounting software for small or medium sized businesses, you may want to consider an alternate program - at the very least don’t pay them for tech support. Apparently all they know how to do is to install and use the program. If it doesn’t work, format your hard drive (yes, I was really told by Intuit that formatting my hard drive would solve the problem).

This is horrible. They are the de-facto standard so they can get away with this and people will continue to use their products. I use it in my business, most accountants know this program, and finding an accountant who uses something else is like trying to find a computer consultant who uses Macintosh. Sure, they’re out there, but fewer to choose from and you’re always taking a chance by being outside what is considered “normal”.

Quickbooks tech support wins my vote for the worst tech support ever in the history of tech support.

Tags: bad tech support, clueless, Intuit, outsourced support, Quickbooks

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Humor, Tech Talk, complaining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.