Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Unreasonable Companies?
New submitter Ash-Fox writes: I recently ran into troubles trying to get reasonable quality of support from an anti-virus vendor, where they are attempting to cop-out of providing any reasonable support and then refusing to offer refunds under the guise of their EULA does not allow it. However, their EULA does not implicitly say that they cannot provide refunds in other circumstances, as the support tries to imply, and further living in Europe (as is the anti-virus headquarters), this EULA for sales is only valid if that was provided as the terms of sales contract, which it was not. How do other Slashdotters look to address companies that behave poorly and seek to only provide at best their minimum legal requirements?
We give them monopolies over public utilities.
1. It's not built-in functionality
2. It's in beta (as of 8/10/2016) - Bash on Ubuntu on Windows && Installation Guide. This is only available to a specific subset of Windows users (eg Windows Insiders Program).
Disclaimer: "This is the first release of Bash on Windows and it is branded "beta" deliberately - it's not yet complete! You should expect many things to work and for some things to fail! We greatly appreciate you using Bash on Windows and helping us identify the issues we need to fix in order to deliver a great experience."
You can't expect 100% compatibility with something still in beta. There are broken things and things that will be changed. Expecting Avast to work with it right now or refund you for a beta-product is unreasonable. Maybe common handles things differently than civil law in this case. I know Europe has better consumer protections in many many ways than the US, but I can't see where anyone would reasonably expect a refund or extensive support for a beta add-in when the product works perfectly with production level software (aka Win 10).
That's really the central problem from what you've posted. You need technical support so a ticket can get opened in whatever 3rd world coding farm they have outsourced the product to. Seeing that your support request is being handling by someone who's title says "customer retention" means you will never get a refund, and your issue will never be resolved. That's just not what they are there to do. On the org chart they probably roll up to the sales group.
Cut your losses and move on.
Not doing business with them again is a start, but honestly one of the things I've found is that some businesses who do some *amazingly* bad support/PR, also seem to have public walls on their Facebook pages. I've had decent luck getting some response from businesses by posting a detailed summary of my issues on their wall.
You are talking about somewhere between $50-$100, right? You walk away from it, and realize that your time could (HOPEFULLY?) be better spent on more productive things.
When a small store gave me incorrect change, and was unpleasant about the correction of that error, I walked away and never came back. Anything else would have not been worth my time. Unless you want to turn this into a hobby, I suggest you take a similar approach. Whenever anyone asks me about that store, I tell them a similar story, and advise them to go to a different store. That alone cost the store far more than when they jacked from me on my change. It was the store owner that robbed me.
Not sure if my experience is typical or not I had a fairly good experience when dealing with the US Federal Consumer Protection Bureau (CFPB), MN Department of Commerce, and MN State Attorney General's Office when I was dealing with a shit bag debt collection company and I gather now that all 3 agencies now have an open investigation into them.
The debt collection company was trying to collect a student loan debt from someone who only shared my first name. The collection company started calling and when ever I would answer there wouldn't be anyone on the line. When they would call caller ID would always list the caller as "Toll Free Call" and when looking up the number online I didn't see anything indicating who was calling. When I would answer the phone I would inform them that this is harassment, that they have been told previously to never contact me ever and that I am informing them to never contact me again. I started recording the calls (video recording) and after having them call me multiple times in the same day and being told the line above. After about a week of this and after the day when they called me 4 times and were told I filed a complaint with the MN State Attorney General seeking relief and providing what limited information I had received. A few days later the Attorney General's Office responded and provided detailed information on the company and information on who else I should be filing a complaint about a shit bag debt collection company. Additionally the Attorney General's Office had sent a demand to the company indicating that they were to no longer contact me that also demanded that they respond to an inquery now started by the Attorney General's Office.
So at that point I filed complaints with the CFPB and MN Department of Commerce. A day later I received confirmation that the CFPB had contacted the debt collector and that they were to no longer contact me by phone. Unfortunately the debt collection company disregarded this and continued to call for a couple of more days. This caused me to file additional complaints with the CFPB and MN Department of commerce about their continued harassment at this point as well as forwarding all of this information to the Attorney General's Office. A bit later I get a response through the CFPB from the debt collector in which they provided all of the information they had on the loan including the loan application (this included mother's maiden name, previous addresses current addresses, employer at the time, wage information, social security number, banking information), copy of the person's drivers license, copy of their social security card, and a letter directed to me informing me that I had 7 days to to work out payment details otherwise they would be suing me and seizing my assets. The problem is that the information I provided to the CFPB clearly demonstrated that I was not the actual owner of this debt, which they could have figured out from public records even before hand having never been in the states where the person who the debt belonged to, not ever having a drivers license from that state, having a different middle and last name, having a different birth date (over 15 years different), and attending a different school. In their letter they also indicated that they had no record of me ever answering the phone let alone being told to never call me as well as stating that they never called me after being contacted by the CFPB.
I responded to their letter with one of my own informing them that any attempt to collect this debt from me by them or any other company I will view as an attempt to defraud me and that I would also consider them a co-conspirator in the action and would be filing a criminal complaint. I explained to them that they had broken the law several times including their outright lies and that I had recorded a number of their calls and can provide evidence showing that I had told them multiple times to never contact me in the same day as well as provide evidence of them continuing to call me after being to
Time to offend someone