unCubeme

For the year of 2009 I’m officially giving my worst customer service award to the creators of the popular mac virtualization software, Parallels. They somehow managed to surpassed the worst of the worst for customer support this year in my opinion. Although Central Parking Systems came in a close second charging me $13 for one hour while grabbing dinner(FYI their policy is no monetary refunds). Back to the creator of Parallels though, because they easily took the cake.

I didn’t have all that difficult of a question. It was simply, “What is the upgrade policy for users who purchased Parallels 4.0 in September.” Nothing that crazy since Parallels 5.0 came out this November. HA, little did I know what faced me. The total time span of trying to get this question answered took between 60 – 90 minutes.

Step one I thought I would go to their website and look for their customer support number. Simple enough they have a fairly easy to navigate website. So after easily finding the 24×7 customer support number I tried the toll free number. There was a menu prompt do you use Parallels desktop press 1. Then I had to press 1 again as a Mac, or Linux Parallels user. After that I kept keeping disconnected. So I ended up trying the other number for the 24×7 support. After about 25 minutes of fumbling through the automated menu I was finally able to speak to a live person. The person I spoke to was having a hard time speaking or understanding English. I spent the next 10 minutes explaining how to say my name(Michael) and spell it repeatedly. While giving the woman my call back number she hung up on me. WHAT THE HELL!!!

I tried calling back and after about another 20 minutes I was finally back to speaking to a real live person. Go figure, I got the exact same support representative who proceeded to tell me sorry her phone line dropped. Fair enough sometime technical glitches happen. After repeatedly speaking very slowly asking my question about an upgrade deal for recent purchasers of Parallels 4 she finally grasped what I was asking and said there wasn’t anything she could do. I thought OK that’s fine. I asked to speak to her supervisor so he could verify. She said sure no problem and then hung up again.