Macromedia: A Bad Customer Experience

Wednesday, September 14, 2005 at 8:47 pm | Comments off

Here goes a rant about my recent experience with Macromedia. You've been warned...

I had to call Macromedia today to get the status of my order for Studio 8, which I pre-ordered on August 10th. First of all, Macromedia never sent me an email saying Studio 8 was shipping, so had I not found out through a couple of the blogs I read, I wouldn't have even known it was shipping until I checked out macromedia.com. You'd think since I pre-ordered it, they would have sent an email to me when the product started shipping.

So, armed with the information that Studio 8 had started shipping, I logged in to my account at Macromedia to see if my copy had shipped. Once I logged in, I saw this:

Pending. Great. What does that mean? I decided to call Macromedia to find out.

What a mistake. Along side my account information, they had a number to purchase by phone. Since this was the first number I saw, this was the number I called. After a short time on hold, I was told that since I ordered online and since this was the order by phone line, they could not look up my order. Come on, you're the same company aren't you? You'd think this was a government operation, since one devision couldn't seem to talk to the other. Anyway, since they weren't going to help me, I asked them to transfer me to the online ordering support, so I could ask them what the status of my order was. So here I am sitting on hold hearing this every 2 minutes or so:

"Our agents are unusually busy at this time. You may continue to hold for the next available agent, or to leave a message to be returned by the next available agent, press 1 now."

I chose the first option, as I know how the "we'll return your call" normally works, and I wanted an answer this week...

After about 15 minutes or so of this, the nice lady that kept telling me the agents were "unusually busy" (ie. out getting coffee) came on and told me something along the lines of:

"You are the weakest link. Goodbye."

*Click*

Wait a gosh darned minute, here. I'm sitting patiently on hold for 15 minutes, and their computerized hold system hangs up on me?! You have got to be kidding me!

I call right back, the phone sales number again, as I wanted to give them a piece of my mind. I told them that their bloody computer hung up on me, and the phone sales lady I was talking to ensured me she'd put me right through to the online sales, so I could get my answers. She asked if she could put me on hold for 30 seconds to patch me though. Warily, I agreed. So much for 30 seconds - 10 minutes later, the online ordering support finally picked up. All I wanted was my order status, so I gave her my order number, and she told me it was in transit to the carrier (UPS).

Ok, a big question here... Why not tell me on my order status page that the order is in transit to the carrier, like Amazon does? It would have saved me over 30 minutes this morning, and made for a much better customer experience. One final thing... I checked the "remember me" box on the login page for a reason - why on earth do you absolutely insist on logging me out all the time, even within one browser session?

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