I called Adobe customer service sometime last week about an extra charge I’d received on my subscription edition of their software that I wanted a refund on. After some struggling and talking to a few people, I managed to get them to ‘escalate’ my case and they said their higher up sales team would get back to me in 24 – 48 hours. Here is my account of my trying to chase that up close to a week later.
8:19am – Started call to Adobe customer service.
8:59am – Get through to Customer Support. Takes my name, email address and contact number. Transfers me to Sales.
~8:40am – Get through to Sales. Takes my name, email address and contact number. Tells me they’ll check into it and puts the phone down (not on hold)
9:20am – Still no one coming to the phone. Hear random noises and sniggering in background.
9:34am – Get bored and play ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ into phone loudly in hopes someone will hear. No one appears to.
9:58am – Give up on this person. Hang up the phone and start again. Don’t have direct number to Sales so start from the beginning with Customer Service
11:00am - Get through to Customer Service. Takes my name, email address and contact number. Explain issue again. Start crying from frustration. They transfer me to Sales.
11:14am – Get through to… Tech Support? Previous person transferred the call to the wrong department! Takes my name, email address and contact number anyway. Tech Support transfers to Sales.
11:24am – Get through to Sales! Takes my name, email address and contact number. Beg him not to put me on hold. He puts the phone down and goes to check into things.
11:40am – Sales guy says he’s going to check into it further and get back to me in 24 – 48 hours.
Total time on phone: 3 hours, 21 minutes
Number of people spoken to: 5
Number of times name, email address and phone repeated: 5
Number of times I’ve been called back: 0
Number of calls (on mobile) made to Adobe’s Australian sales team (who don’t have hold, just an answering machine) whilst on hold on main line: 12
Number of messages left with an increasingly irritated tone on Adobe’s Australian sales team’s answering machine: 3
Total refunded so far: $0
Amount spent on Adobe’s subscription edition software over 2.5 years: $3870 (not including the times they’ve over charged me and I’ve fought for a refund)
This is just today – I have similar struggles with Adobe every time I call them, and there seems to be something I need to call them about every 6 months or so. I’m glad that this time it’s an issue that didn’t make my software not work, so at least I was able to get some work done during the nearly 3 and a half hours spent on the phone. Even if it was whilst listening to horrible hold music.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about my frustrating experience with Adobe software and support. It still astounds me that such an expensive product has such awful customer service. It’s really no wonder that so many people use pirated copies of this software – it probably has less issues than ‘doing the right thing’. Sadly I’m a bit trapped as my industry pretty much requires me to use this software, so I guess I’ll have to keep struggling along.
