Norton Shenanigans / Indian Technical Support

So my Norton Anti-virus program has been squawking the last few weeks saying that my subscription is running out and do I want to renew it. I’m actually not too satisfied with the program, so no, I don’t want to renew it, and dutifully click so.

Well, we got an email yesterday from Norton saying that they had automatically renewed us for the next year and charged our credit card $40. The email had some fine print:

As a reminder, during the original purchase, you authorized Symantec to use the contact and billing information provided during purchase activity to charge each renewal. You also authorized Digital River, Symantec's authorized online reseller, to transfer the contact and billing information you provided for your purchase today to Symantec for this purpose.

Must have been in some fine print/EULA thing when we bought it, since that’s not the sort of thing that my wife or I would ever approve.

So their audacity is pretty funny; I mean if they really believed that I was down with them automatically resubscribing me, they wouldn’t have bothered asking me if I wanted to renew; they just would have done it. Or, they could have “reminded” me that I already said it was ok, but wanted me to confirm anyways. No, they did the sneaky thing of trying to get me to do it, then when I wouldn’t, they did it for me and told me I already told them they could.

Of course, while I see the humor in the situation, there’s no way I’m going to take sh*t like that from a company that I’m paying money to. Not to mention that there’s no way I want such a shady company in charge of the security on my computer. So not much question that I was going to cancel and get my money back. Of course, the email didn’t say anything about how to do that (another sign that they don’t have the strength of their convictions, and that they know they’re being shady). So I went to their support website to see how to cancel, and they kindly put me in an infinite loop:

- Go to tech support page A

- What do you want to do?

- Cancel? Go to tech support page B

- What product do you have?

- Norton AV 2006. What do you want to do?

- Cancel? Ok, go to tech support page A

I went through that loop three times, and tried a number of other things before breaking down and calling tech support. Waited on the phone for thirty minutes. Spoke with a gentleman with a heavy Indian accent who called himself “Michael”. He helped me out very efficiently, and hopefully the sorry affair is done with now.

Which gets me to the point of this post (other than that fact that I now hate Norton): what’s the deal with foreign tech support people going by American names? Who ever thought this was a good idea?

Let’s break this down. You’re probably in a bad mood, or you wouldn’t be calling tech support. This is probably the first human contact you have with the company, and the very first thing out of the company representative’s mouth is a lie. Not just any lie; they’re lying about their name. Who does that? Is that really the best way to start off a conversation? For me, it makes it hard to respect either them or their company after that.

Now I understand that people in India and other foreign countries have names that are unusual to Americans, and that might be off-putting to someone calling tech support. It shouldn’t be, but maybe it is. I’m not sure why this needs explanation, but if you’re going to outsource support to India, one consequence of this is that Indians will be taking people’s calls. If you don’t think your customers can deal with that, then maybe you should rethink your outsourcing decision.