Have you ever used Norton's live chat for support?
Posted by Martin in Comment | 1 April 2007
Well it's not often that I have a rant. Last time was about Arsenal's website and the problems I had using it. In that instance I did write to Arsenal's IT director, but never got a response!
Well this time it's about Norton (Symantec) and their live "chat" tool, for getting help on-line. Eventually!
Now I've used live chat tools before, and I have to say I like them and the Norton experience hasn't put me off. But Norton must have one of the worst waiting time records, unless you know different.
My Norton experience started when my daughter came back from uni and after a few days found that she was unable to get onto the internet via her laptop.
Like most fathers I was given the task of trying to fix her techie problems. Initially I thought the problem was simply to do with our router not allowing her access, but this I soon dismissed.
After many hours of fiddling with the P.C I came to the conclusion that the problem was either caused by a virus (my daughter insisted she hadn't downloaded anything) or that the antivirus software had been updated and was the cause of the problem. (I’ve experienced this before)
It transpired to be the latter. I tried running "LiveUpdate" and it kept failing. I can't remember the exact error message, but it had the word "proxy" in it, which immediately rang alarm bells!
Well to cut a long and not a very exciting story short, I eventually found the Norton live chat agent to get some help.
Great, Norton kindly told me I was third in the queue and very quickly (pleasantly surprised) I was able to chat to "Ahmed" (think that was his name). He concluded that the only answer was to upgrade to Norton version 2007 and he provided me with the instructions. So off I went.
Now, I had to wait for my daughter to return to complete the upgrade, as she had the license details. But having entered them, Norton kept saying they were invalid.
Back to a new live chat session.
This time though I was 130 something in the queue!! How could this be possible?
But being British and familiar with the concept of queuing I duly waited my turn, (I managed to watch an entire 2 hour film while waiting) and eventually I was second in the queue.
Finally my turn came and I tried to ask my question, the computer said “NO”, tried again, same response.
For some reason the live chat session had been terminated. My only option was to go back and begin queuing all over again.
This time I was 140 something!!
Too late for me, but these uni students seem to come alive at night, so I left my daughter to queue and the problem was fixed.
Now what I'd like to know is :
1) Why I got the Norton problem in the first place - with 270 people queuing, I can't have been alone! No explanation was offered by Ahmed as to why the problem had materialised.
2) What Norton are going to do to solve their sporadic waiting time problems?
If you’ve had a similar experience, let me know, I might even try and write to Norton’s IT director. Not that I’m likely to get a response!