Friday, December 20, 2013

Motorola Moto G Technical Support

We recently purchased two of Motorola's new products, the Moto G.  For the most part we are initially impressed with the new phones, but only one of them will connect for transferring files.  I think they call the type of connection MTP.  It would connect as a camera, but that limited it to just the camera directory, so I couldn't transfer to the music directory.

I am guessing I could've transferred to the camera directory and then transferred out of it and into the music folder with the phone itself.

I contacted technical support via chat.  I waited to be connected to someone for about 15 minutes.   Once I got connected they asked me to do the usual "turn it off and back on" and such.  I had already done that and did it again.  No luck.  They gave me a link to some article about clearing the cache or something.  While I read the article and tried to figure out how to do what it was explaining the tech support agent typed to me that I had been inactive for two minutes and they were going to give me one more minute and then disconnected.

The link they sent me did not work for me.  I could not tell them, since they hung up on me.

I don't understand why they were in such a hurry to hang up.  It is a chat window.  You should be able to have several chat windows up, so they could help another customer while waiting on me.  The only explanation I can think of is that there is some metric that some manager is using to measure performance.  They must be tracking how quickly they resolve the call.  That doesn't measure if they actually helped me.

I hurried and went back to chat and sat on hold for another 15 to 20 minutes.  The customer service person quickly walked me through finding my serial number and then quickly gave me a phone number and other information on Level 2 tech support, which I couldn't call until morning, and then hung up on me again.

Level 2
The next morning I called level 2 support.  Level 1 had told me that if I entered in my phone number at the beginning of the call, level 2 would see the chat history and be able to read everything that we had talked about before helping me.

When I called level 2, then asked me for my phone number a second time, even though I entered it in their system via the phone I was calling from.  They then asked what they could help me with.  I asked if they had read the chat history.  They said they had not and put me on hold to read them.

Level 1 support had tried to switch me into developer mode at one point, but didn't know how to do it properly.  Level 2 tried the same thing.

They wanted me through switching it, but also gave the wrong instructions, but I ended up getting it to go anyway.  They had told me to tap About Phone 7 times in settings.  It only took three.  That allowed up to turn on USB debugging.  Once I did that I could see all the folders, even though it still would not go into MTP mode normally.

I took this work around, since it did what I needed, but I was concerned about leaving a phone in developer mode, where the user could inadvertently get into something that could make a mess.  Tech support told me how to turn it off (tap About Phone seven times) and the instructions were incorrect.  All it did was tell me the phone was already in developer mode.  They never could get it to switch out of developer mode.

While in developer tools I notice a switch to turn it off.  It still left the developer tools menu, but once in there it had to be turned on or off, so that was more acceptable to me.  It still did not fix the problem with the phone, but it gave me a work around.

As support worked with me, it was like they were unfamiliar with my phone.  This was true of level 1 and level 2 support.  Perhaps it is too new, but I figured Android Jelly Bean on one Motorola phone would be the same as another.

The bottom line is that Motorola customer service appeared not well trained and more interested cranking a call queue than solid support of their customers.  By the length of time I spent on hold and the desire of customer service to dump calls, it also appears that they are under staffed.  Additionally, I got a work around, but the problem was not solved.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

AVG Search Powered By Yahoo!

In the early days of both of these brand I really liked them.  After this experience, their good name is no longer good with me.

I installed a free license key recovery tool to recover some Microsoft software license keys before we migrated to another machine.

I realize free should've made me cautious, but a guy at work said he used it and wanted me to use it to get the information we needed.  I don't recalled seeing anything that said it was going to install other software or a check box to make it not do so.

As I started to use my Chrome browser, I notice that my New Tab behavior had changed.  When I would create a new tab window for browsing, it would bring up AVG Search powered by Yahoo.  It usually just brought up the recently accessed pages page, but now that was gone.  I would've expected that if something changed it would have brought up my home page.

I checked my home page settings and it was still set to Google.  I also saw that the setting was set to not show the home page, but the recently used pages.

I looked around the browser and around the settings and found nothing that looked out of the ordinary.

I finally saw someone mention to look in add remove programs.  I thought I had, but perhaps I didn't since the browser did not appear to have an ad-ware toolbar on it.  The browser looked fine.

Nonetheless, I opened Add/Remove Programs and sure enough I found AVG Search powered by Yahoo.  I uninstalled it and the problem went away.

This practice is slimy and marketing trickery.  When I install one program and having it not only install another program, but having that program hook into one of the other programs on my machine is a foul marketing practice.

I stopped using AVG because it became a little bloated and Microsoft came out with their own, but I still had good feelings toward AVG.  Now I feel that AVG is a tainted brand and if I ever see the AVG brand on anything I will be steering clear of it and if I cannot steer clear of it I will be very cautious to not trust it.

I don't use Yahoo for search anymore and haven't for years, but I do use it for stock quote and TV listings.  I also use it if I am trying to test that a computers internet settings are working.  After this experience I will be finding another source for stock quotes and TV listings.

I have talked to marketing people and their seems to be a feeling among some of them that annoying and trying to trap potential customers is good marketing, because they might eventually buy the product if you stay in front of them.

Businesses that behave this way end up being blacklisted by security software, email servers, and sometimes phone systems.

The idea that "no" probably means "yes" or at least a strong "maybe" is unacceptable.