Adobe Publicly Apologizes About its Customer Service
Publicly acknowledging a recent spate of complaints about tech support and customer service, Adobe wrote all of us an “I’m sorry, I’ll do better” letter and slipped it under our door this morning, figuratively speaking. They posted it as a PDF halfway down their main support page. You can go there, or just click here to download it (PDF, 124K).
Titled “Open Letter to Adobe Customers,” Adobe’s director of Technical Services, Lambert Walsh, apologized to the company’s end users for “a level of service that is inconsistent with what [our customers] expect and deserve.” He explained that a transition to a new “global service provider” didn’t go as smoothly as they had planned and are taking immediate action to rectify problems.
In the meantime, he says if you can’t get what you need from your local Adobe customer service people, you can escalate unresolved issues by sending an e-mail to adbecare@adobe.com.
To me, this is another example of why I so admire the Adobe ethos. They’re not a faceless corporation — you can see the quality people behind everything they do. After I read the letter, I believe Lambert Walsh really is somewhat mortified at what’s been going on with his department, and his public pledge to fix it ensures the issues will be fixed, because now everyone’s watching.
I do have one niggling complaint. The PDF was created with Microsoft Word, not InDesign. What gives? 
Well, that’s reassuring. Having spent 2 hours talking to and fro over a niggle with reactivating a copy of InDesign CS2 and finding myself repeating the issue over and over only to be given the same – non-working – “solution” I had to give up due to delivery deadlines.
Yesterday I received an email announcing the problem closed and asking for my impressions of the service.
I won’t flatter myself that my very low-scoring reply helped produce that mea culpa…
Their ethos would look a lot better if they didn’t need to apologize in the first place.
Outsourcing your tech support (I’m assuming that’s what they did?) is not the way to win friends and influence people. It just proves the adage: “Customer service — it’s just a slogan.”
For what we pay, we should not have to go through what Tim Osmond (first comment) did. Adobe wasted two hours of his billable time.
If Mr. Walsh is “mortified” at what’s happening in his department, maybe he needs to be replaced with someone who actually manages.
This is not news. Adobe has had customer support problems for quite some time now. Just look at the forums on Adobe’s own site and how many times Adobe employees had to intervene. The vast majority have to do with installation, activation and registration issues. Tim’s situation is not unusual.
I have had the above happen recently and now I look at the forums a lot so I can avoid the above from happening to me again.
Actually, my recent experience with Quark was faster and superior than with Adobe customer support. But with Quark’s recent layoffs and marginalization Adobe has no fear of losing customers with such poor support. Who else can you go to for design tools that are commonly used in this industry? I think Adobe knows this, no matter the apologies.
I’ve got to say that my Quark 6.5 installation a few years back was super easy with Quark. I called the 1-800 number, got a nice lady in India who quickly reset the server so I could reinstall Quark on my new machines. Only took a few minutes.
Fortunately, I actually haven’t had any problems with CS4 installs. (CS2 was a different story). I’m running a volume license at my office, and on my home machines I have my own regular install that allows for two installs. I’m also very clear on the activate and deactivations before moving my CS installs.
Here’s my niggling complaint.
Since this outsourcing was all about money it would have been nice if they didn’t use the stock symbol in the email address.
Adobe castrated Bridge to save money. No more photo services. Every time I try to use a feature on Bridge it has been disabled or pulled.
Part of the huge cost of Adobe is product support. I didn’t get the extras I expected.
Goodies should not be provided by 3rd party companies. Adobe should give plug-ins and clip art, backgrounds and tutorials to all owners. And perhaps provide retail sales of such with added certification by Adobe itself.
I resonate with this and I sure hope that they get it together. When I upgraded to CS4, I couldn’t do it over the internet and then I had to spend 1.5 hours on the phone to get them to do it. Since I work out of the country, my billing address is the US. Instead of sending the product to my “shipping address” which is a US based courier service in Florida, they sent it to billing address in a completely different state and then NEVER answered my complaint email. CS4 ended up costing me even more money, due to no fault whatsoever of my own. They should take a lesson from Apple. They have outstanding customer service. All in all, one can only hope that they’re serious.
Adobe would do better to overhaul policies that cause unnecessary customer service calls to begin with.
Like Adobe’s draconian activation process:
I’ve only ever had to call Adobe customer service once (well twice) and that was over upgrading from PageMaker to InDesign CS3. PM had to be installed (it was, I had been using it for years). CS3 wouldn’t recognize it. Move on to direct entry of PM serial number. CS3 wouldn’t recognize it. Call customer service. “Go to start menu…” “I’m on a Mac.” Clueless silence on other end/hear rep asking rep in next cubical “he’s on a Mac, now what am I suppose to do?”. “Give me your serial number…” “That’s not a PM serial number…” “Funny, it’s what’s printed on my Adobe PageMaker serial number card.” (And yes, it was an ADOBE serial number even though I had upgraded from Aldus PageMaker to Adobe PageMaker. You know, the one I’ve registered online with at Adobe.) More clueless silence. On to bizarro click 5 times fast in registration dialog box/prompt and reply system to get InDesign registered. (God help me if I every upgrade my systems.) Repeat entire procedure from the beginning (and in every detail in another phone call) for installation on my laptop. Ugh. Leaves a bad taste in your mouth for an otherwise beautiful app.
Wasn’t this bad for Photoshop and I’ve been buying “upgrades” since v3 (and it was even an OEM version that came with my scanner).
Web sites like this one are a far better option for regular technical help anyway. Usually far more competent too, since David and Anne-Marie and company make a living using InDesign day-in and day-out. (And friendlier to boot!)
P.S. I love false familiarity they try to pull off. Look, everyone knows you’re somewhere in India and you speak with an Indian accent. Why would I care? Just don’t tell me your name is “sally.” Heck, the exotic nature of your real name would bring some welcome spice to an otherwise dull conversation! Isn’t that part of the fun of an international community?
Seems I’m the only one who’s satisfied with Adobe support, but then again, as far as I know they haven’t outsourced our customer service to India as Dutch probably isn’t spoken very often there, plus I haven’t had any problems with the software I needed help with.
The only reasons I have called them were for upgrades — the CS3-CS4 upgrade had to be ordered by phone for some reason, and for the CS2-CS3 upgrade I wanted some more info and got a money-saving tip in one go — and to get CS2 re-activated after two catastrophic HDD failures in a row.
Customer service? What customer service?!?
Well I have to say that from my perspective (person who sends clients to Adobe Customer Service when I can’t help); they’re usually satisfied with the help they’ve received. At least, when I follow up with them, they’ve had their issue resolved. This probably happened about seven or eight different companies over the last year … so just my own experience, but it was more than a couple incidents. The last time I had to call CS myself was when I was out of town with my laptop and GoLive CS2 said I had exceeded my licensing. I had to call and get authorization. It was taken care of in a few minutes, after a little nerve-wracking back and forth.
That said, it’s obvious some customers haven’t been treated right by the CS department — and I know how that feels too, at least with other companies … extremely frustrating! — but I don’t think it’s fair to say their customer service is horrendous across the board, or completely lacking.
I wrote the post about Adobe’s letter to make sure that everyone in our audience was aware of Adobe’s efforts to resolve a problem, and to learn the email address for unresolved issues. The comments have been enlightening, for the most part, but I’ve think they’ve run their course, so I hope you understand why I’m closing comments on this guy. If you want to talk about Adobe’s customer service or its “open letter to customers” some more, I think most of that discussion is taking place on Adobe’s own “Adobe.com Feedback” forum. There is also a Facebook page that’s kind of like a grassroots action by Adobe customers for better support, and Lambert Walsh is a participant in the discussion there.