Resolving complaints shouldn’t require acrobatics

Sometimes I wonder how our corporations lead the world. Seriously, are foreign companies even worse at customer service than ours?

There are lessons to be learned for financial advisers from my recent bad experience with customer service.

Last week, to help my son with a project for his master’s degree in business administration, I tried to upgrade my version of Adobe Acrobat. The cost for the upgrade was $105.99.

However, after completing the purchase online and attempting to download the software, I found that the upgrade was incompatible with the program that came with my computer. My son told me he didn’t think the project warranted buying a more expensive version of Acrobat, so I decided to cancel the transaction and called Adobe customer service to find out how to do so.

After going through the call tree to the correct extension, I held on the line, listening to awful music for an hour without anyone picking up, so I hung up.

I decided to try going through the back door, calling tech support for the product. Here the wait was only 10 minutes, and the tech support person put me through to customer support through another line within a few minutes.

I got the directions I needed, filled out the online form and submitted it.

The total time returning the product and reversing the transaction? About an hour and 25 minutes.

Four days later, there was a credit for $105.99 on my credit card. Excellent.

The next day, there was another credit on the card for $105.99.

Being an honest person, I made the mistake of calling customer service to let them know they had credited me twice and to figure out how to reverse it.

After 45 minutes of listening to the same awful music without anyone picking up the phone, I gave up again.

Not to be thwarted by the customer (lack of) service department, this time, I called the main phone number at Adobe headquarters and registered a complaint. “I’m trying to give you your money back,” I told the young woman on the phone.

She said she would pass the information on to the head of customer service, who would get back to me as soon as possible.

I guess $105.99 isn’t much to a major corporation like Adobe, because it was more than 24 hours later, when I had just about decided to give the money to charity, that I got a call from customer service, and we arranged how they would get the money back.

Clearly, Adobe has underinvested in customer service. In the long term, that can’t be good for the company.

I know the whole experience jaundiced my view of it and its products.