Symantec Norton 360 -- Promises, Promises, Promises

Symantec customer service is a figment of some executive's imagination....from the customer's perspective it does not really exist. Yes, there are well intentioned 'customer service' agents in Hyberdad or Guergon or some similar place on the other side of the Atlantic who patiently, precisely and continually follow the script proscribed by the outsourcing SLA, but can they REALLY do anything but repeat the problem description, your contact information and promise the non-existant follow up call from "the Escalation Department in California". The answer is clearly, undeniably and always "NO".

My online purchase of the Norton 360 AV product was smooth enough, except when attempting to upload content for backup and restore purposes. After just a few files, the product informed me I was out of memory and needed to purchase additional storage. I followed the on-screen directions, and the way they work, or don't work, ended up purchasing not one, but two additional traunches of 10 MB. Ok, so they're fairly cheap, and who knows maybe I'll need them down the road. But the on-screen directions never told me each traunch needs to be individually "activated". I first tried the "online chat" service, twice (chat # 805579 and #806278) but the nice people in India put me on eternal hold after it became clear I was going to be asking for something that required more than their basic scripts could handle....and they ran screaming from the chat session in search of their supervisor who never showed up despite the fact I held for more than 15 minutes each time.

And, try as I might, even with the "live help" of the well intentioned Mr. Patel and Mr. Prakash or whatever their names are, the additional storage won't activate. And, Mr. Patel has no answers; all he can to is to "escalate the issue to the department in California for further research". Migod, I'm not trying to win a Nobel price in chemistry here, I'm just trying to get the product to do what Symantec said it would do...upload and restore content.

The second problem with Norton 360 is that it won't restore what HAS been uploaded. Even with the firewall off, the restore fuction just cranks away endlessly without restoring any of the files the inventory says are on the Symantec server. It would go on for hours if I'd let it. One more time to Hyberdad...."Yes Sir, I can see you're having a problem (blah, blah, blah)...and your contact information is (blah, blah, blah). Yes, Sir, I can understand you would like to see the problem fixed. Sir, I have again "ESCALATED THE ISSUE TO THE RESEARCH DEPARTMENT IN CALIFORNIA". "I PROMISE YOU THEY WILL BE CALLING YOU WITHIN 24 HOURS". Right! That promise was more than five days ago, and has been subsequently repeated no fewer than three more times by the chaps in India, each time the return time for the call got shorter and shorter. The last one was FIFTEEN MINUTES. "Yes Sir, I can absolutely promise you, with 100% certainty, that you will be hearing from the Research Department in California most definately within the next 15 minutes". Right. Empty promises delivered in Queens English but full of BS, are still just BS!

The creme de la creme was the email follow up I received from Symantec asking if I was "satisfied" with the customer service experience and if the issue was resolved. I'm sure my response has been "ESCALATED TO THE RESEARCH DEPARTMENT IN CALIFORNIA". And so the saga continues.....and I wait for the fantasy, the figmantary imagination of customer service from Symantec/Norton to miraculously happen.

Continuing to be frustrated by product and service promises that don' exist,

Kim Anderson