I had a really bad user experience today. I looked at my bank account online and saw that Symantec had helped itself to 39 of my dollars for automatically renewing my antivirus. Hello? I never, ever authorize automatic withdrawals, so somewhere in the AV install I did last summer, auto-renewal sneakily authorized itself. It was probably in the click wrap that I agreed to without ever reading. God knows what all I’ve agreed to over the years.
I consider this bad UX because a) I really never do automatic withdrawals, so they really must have hidden the option (defaulted to “Yes! take my money!”) pretty well, and b) as a corporation, it’s stupid, because of the cost involved in dealing with all the people who call bullshit on that and ask for their money back. There’s the support call, plus whatever costs are associated with returning the money, including people resources and actual transaction costs. Maybe they make it back in float. After all, it’s going to be 6 working days before I get my cash back.
All my animosity toward Symantec turned around, however, during the second really excellent (probably offshored) tech support interaction I can recall in my lifetime*. All websites try to hide the link or email address for support. You can’t really blame them. If you’d just read the FAQs, you might just find your answer. After I found the link to a support online chat and completed a form to identify myself, the chat widget informed me that I was 54th in line.
Now, at this point, you’d think I’d be pissed: 54th!! But happily, I’m rocking the dual monitors and just kept surfingworking during the 30-ish minute wait. Eventually Sudeep The Support Guy joined me, and with a minimum of fuss did whatever magic necessary to refund my money. I didn’t have to grovel or bitch or anything!
BUT HERE’S THE BEST PART: Sudeep flattered me. He made me feel very good about my excellent complaining skillz. (Yeah, yeah. I know he sucks up to all the girls.) I have a screen cap (below). Since this was the best thing that’s happened to me so far today, I flattered him back and even gave him a smiley. I’m sure he made a screen cap too. When was the last time you had such a good user experience in the support domain? Yep, we’re all eating rainbows and farting butterflies today!
*If you’ve read this far, you must be DEAD bored today and have absolutely nothing else to do besides read about the FIRST good support experience I had, coincidentally enough, just last week, and also involving automatic withdrawals from my bank account. OK, so I LIED about never ever authorizing auto withdrawals. Sue me. I was forced into auto withdrawal when my son joined ToonTown years ago. They insist on reaching in and grabbing $9.95/mo for him to play innocent Disney MMORPGs. ToonTown is the gateway drug for future online gaming addicts. I got to speak to an actual human who I believe was actually in America, which is notable only for its rarity. HERE’s where it gets amusing: she could not for the Disney life of her understand that I wanted to discontinue ToonTown because my son had grown out of it. How could anybody grow out of frolicking with Piggledy Miggledorf? I had to convince her that his tastes now run more to blowing people’s heads off for fun and profit in WOW and Call of Duty. She still didn’t get it (“HE’s GROWING UP!” I insisted). But she very nicely stopped the auto-withdrawal madness anyhow. See? There is good customer support out there.
August 6, 2008 at 6:20 pm |
I am so happy to learn the phrase ’screen cap’. We frequently use images of bits of a screen for training or testing (I have Snag-It, which I enjoy). The lingo I’ve always used is ’screen shot’ which sounds like an geek’s alcoholic drink. Another phrase I have heard is ’snippet’, but I am not sure how much of a screen is a ’snippet’ and how much is a ’shot’
My favorite feature of Snag-It is the torn edge effect.
August 6, 2008 at 6:33 pm |
My favorite Snag-It feature is how easy it is to slap a text box and arrow on the capture, copy it into an email, and then send it off to somebody. It makes it so easy to capture a lot of detail graphically that you would otherwise use lots of words to convey, such as when asking helpdesk WTF your computer is doing, or emailing a map with specific directions to mom. But I use the torn edge a lot in documentation projects, too.