Pinnacle "support"

I found Bob's Opening Scream on Pinnacle interesting (July CV), not to mention the interminable tales that appear here about their inability to ship stuff that actually works. The whole problem seems to be reflected in their "support" service, and the attitude and approach they take.

(Lest anyone aware of my affinity for Ulead get the wrong idea, I'm not "Pinnacle-bashing" for subversive reasons. On the contrary, having bought a product from them I'd now like them to improve it.)

Allow me to fill in a little background ...

I've never used any of their video s/w, but recently bought a copy of InstantCD/DVD which they'd acquired from VOB. I've always been a WinOnCD fan, but the Disneyland UI of version 6 has been driving me mental (how to kill a great product - thanks a bunch Roxio), and my DVD burner came with InstantCD 6.5, the last edition under the VOB brand.

I'd tried it some time back when it was CD-Wizard and didn't like it, but I found 6.5 actually pretty good. There were a few problems, and I found I could buy ver.7 at an upgrade price, so I did. It's better than 6.5, but there are still some bugs, including one thing that crashes the program.

I wanted to report this and ask when it would be fixed, so I tried the online support. It's strange, because there is no concept of "reporting a problem", merely "asking a question". There's plenty of answers to common questions, making it like a large FAQ, and provision for you to "ask" another question if you can't find an answer.

So I posted the problems, describing what went wrong and how to reproduce etc. and got a most bizarre reply. It was obviously a boiler-plate of standard "hints & tips" paragraphs which were all irrelevant (from "shut down all programs before installing" to "make sure the disk you are copying from is not scratched" - I hadn't even mentioned copying, in fact that works fine!). The response had a person's name attached, so it wasn't automated, but he obviously hadn't even read what I'd written - or just hadn't understood it.

I posted an extremely sharply worded reply, but needless to say have heard no more. The support people are obviously trained to work this way.

What's abundantly clear is that Pinnacle's concept of support is that the only problems that customers encounter are because of things they don't know, don't understand, or haven't learnt how to do yet. The notion that a customer's problem might be because there's actually a fault in the product appears to be totally absent. I'd bet that there is no means for the support operation to feed problems back to development, who probably blissfully believe that the products are wonderful.

Their so-called support operation needs a good kicking, because they won't ever produce good products if they don't grasp the idea of customer feedback.

If their site actually contained an email address or contact name I'd tell them myself, but they don't seem to want any contact with "the masses"!

Fancy beating them over the head, Bob?

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Richard Jones, http://www.activeservice.co.uk
Home of the MediaStudio Pro Tutorial - Edition 3 for MSP 7

[This message has been edited by RichardJ (edited 24 May 2003).]