Top 10 Norton/Symantec Secrets You Shouldn't Know
I awoke this morning to find a dead man on my doorstep, apparently from the gunshot wound to his back. By examining the depth of the tread marks and the streak of blood on the walls, I determined that he had dragged himself up after receiving the fatal bullet. I cleaned up the pool of blood with some extra-thirsty Brawny towels, and rifled the pockets of his black trench coat to find a package addressed to "The Consumerist." A hastily scrawled coversheet read, "Please keep my identity secret, I could lose my job. I have compiled a "10 Norton/Symantec secrets I shouldn't be telling you" list." Too late. Someone already punched his pink slip. Let's read what was inside...
10. You can always install the product on twice as many computers as stated in the EULA. This is enforced via the backend and a grace number is allowed.
9. If you ask for a refund, Symantec will probably give it. If your order is more than 60 days old, Symantec may have to cut you a check, but odds are good Symantec will give you your money back.
8. When you get a order refunded, the product/entitlement/subscription is not disabled on the backend. You can continue to use your product as normal without any consequences.
7. We enroll you into our Automatic Renewal service on the www.symantecstore.com without giving you the chance to opt-out of enrollment during the purchase process. You have to access the link in the email we send you to disable this enrollment.
6. Customer Support in India is the best thing that has ever happened to Norton/Symantec . They take 1+ million calls a month. Prior to outsourcing, the most calls per month was less than 100k. You may hate the accent, but they do great work.
5. We know the performance of our product sucks. This has been an engineering priority for 3 continuous years, progress is being made.
4. You don't have to "upgrade" to get upgrade pricing. From the www.symantecstore.com website, select upgrade and you will pay a reduced price for the upgrade. You may be asked for prior proof of purchase, but you don't have to provide it.
3. When you upgrade from product X to Product Y, product y Does not inherit the subscription time from product X. Calling Support and asking to have the time transferred will provide you with this extra time.
2. Symantec support agents will do whatever it takes to make you happy. This includes giving away free things. We can give free shipping, eliminate processing fees and do price matching as needed. Just ask for it.
1. With the right search engine, you can find coupon codes to buy Symantec software for free. The store website has coupon codes, every company needs codes to test with, some are easily guessable.
BONUS: Here's the Complete Norton Symantec Executive Contact List
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Comments:
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That sounds more like a "Symantec people are actually good guys, they just act like jerks because they are afraid of commitments." rather than "10 things I hate about Symantec".
Kinda made me feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside...
Very interesting... but with better packages being free how does this help?
Wow, engineering has had your sucky performance as a priority for three years ... and it still sucks? Why does this not inspire confidence?
@ThinkerTDM: I have had the pleasure of speaking to India a lot lately, (thank you very much Sears) and just noticed a change - it's like they are using a vocoder or something digital that evens out the accent. You can still tell you are talking to India, but it's different. Not much more clear, but maybe a little. At first I wasn't sure I was talking to a human.
Symantec and Norton's both suck. There are far better alternatives out there. Their names (and cheap pricing if you know where to look) are the only things still selling their products.
Secret #0 :
There are better, free virus/spyware scanners out there, and Norton/Symantec is completely obsolete.
everything else doesn't really matter because of this
5. We know the performance of our product sucks. This has been an engineering priority for 3 continuous years, progress is being made.
The software they sell is crap, but they'll give you a refund for buying crap.
"They take 1+ million calls a month. Prior to outsourcing, the most calls per month was less than 100k. You may hate the accent, but they do great work."
Someone correct me if I am wrong but this sounds bad. This says that their support lines are taking 10 times as many calls as they were when it was US based. Unless the user base has grown by a factor of 10 (which I don't know) that is bad. All it means is that the same people are calling in multiple times to get things resolved.
I'm not comfortable with you guys publishing #8. It seems like a license for people to steal from Symantec.
@Rupan: I'm guessing it means thay are taking calls which used to be hang ups. I once called their tech support in the early 90's. They had their own radio station for hold music, and it used to update hold times. When I called, it was almost an hour hold, but they stayed with me on the phone for about 30 minutes after I wiped my Hard drive by accident.
I have real world disdain for their products as well, but, come on...isn't this a bit over-the-top? Even they don't deserve to have a "How-To" for theft of their products published like this.
"Customer Support in India is the best thing that has ever happened to Norton/Symantec . They take 1+ million calls a month. Prior to outsourcing, the most calls per month was less than 100k. You may hate the accent, but they do great work."
Ha, their call center was in Eugene, OR and I was working there when they decided to outsource to India. They had both callcenters running concurrently for a short time, and we would get calls from the guys in India pretending to be customers because they needed answers to their problems. I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of those million calls were repeat issues/callbacks.
There is no need for antivirus software. Get a good router/hardware firewall and don't download stupid crap and you'll be fine.
@Rupan: I was thinking the same exact thing.
Here's a useful choice... I use it myself and like it, although there might be better out there... just compare it with the rest and choose what you want: [www.avast.com]
Here are other useful links...
[en.wikipedia.org]
[www.virus.gr]
[www.av-comparatives.org]
What is a virus scanner or spyware? I've never heard these terms before, but I use OS X so I guess I don't have to worry about all of this.
@astraelraen:
"Symantec and Norton's both suck. There are far better alternatives out there. Their names (and cheap pricing if you know where to look) are the only things still selling their products."
Their corporate antivirus products are the best that you will find. Symantec Anvtivirus is nothing like Norton Antivirus. It's easy on resources and pretty efficient.
My company uses Backup Exec and when we were experiencing slow backup times on one of our two identical server racks we called in and got some of this overseas customer service.
With Dell, getting these guys is an abysmal experience. With Dell, my wife was asked to get a screwdriver and open up her still-in-warrantee laptop. With Dell I've spent almost an entire afternoon working on a single printer to have him send a tech out (which I informed him was what needed to be done at the beginning of the call).
But this call into Symantec was incredible. I can't pronounce this guys name very well but not only did he get our backup up to speed, but on the server we weren't having any trouble with he cut the backup time in half.
It may have been a fluke, but Symantec is the company I'm not bothered by when it comes to outsourced tech support.
They google for people who have problems and then work the signatures into their AV updates.
@Rupan: Or it means that prior to outsourcing they could only answer 1 in 10 calls.
Most likely it's somewhere in between.
@pianos101: Keep praying that your precious OS doesn't reach a significant market penetration, or you'll be worrying about this stuff soon enough.
Sounds like someone from Norton/Symantec marketing is trying everything they can to sell security software in a down economy.
Where did you get this sales pitch from?
:-)
@PunditGuy: :) I know I'm praying. Though there's still no such thing as spyware on OS X. Every program needs an admin password to install so there is literally zero way for anybody that doesn't have an IQ of 20 to have spyware installed. That has nothing to do with market share. Linux is just infinitely more secure than windows....
@Landru:
it's like they are using a vocoder or something digital that evens out the accent.
Ask them if they feel like you do.
Ugh, how about simply uninstalling Norton/Symantec from your system, thus speeding up its performance overall, and not having to deal with this checklist whatsoever?
Linux is just infinitely more secure than windows....But you said you were running Mac OS X! Not Linux.
@jimv2000: While I'll agree that some years back their corporate products were pretty decent, these days, they seem to suck the life right out of the corporate images I end up using at work. Antivirus slows the system down a lot. Endpoint Enforcement seems to screw up things that it shouldn't screw up. I've pretty much given up hope on Symantec products, but it doesn't seem like there's anything better out there.
Outsourcing to india and supporting companies that do, blows big time. I wont do it-if i can help it and sometimes I cant.
Customer Support in India is the best thing that has ever happened to Norton/Symantec . They take 1+ million calls a month. Prior to outsourcing, the most calls per month was less than 100k. You may hate the accent, but they do great work.
I like the rest of the info in this list, but the assumption we're being asked to make here, that more calls = better for the customer, is ridiculous. If you'd said they take more calls AND have a higher customer satisfaction rating than your US call centers used to have, then you'd have an argument.
As this line item is worded, and without any other information about the efficacy of the call center that processes more calls, all this means to me is, "They'll spend less time with you trying to make you a satisfied customer (within reason and fairly to both sides) and more time worrying about how to get you off the phone to keep their calls per hour statistics up."
@jimv2000:
Very, very likely. If I have to call customer service and somebody answers that I can't understand, I hang up and call back until I get somebody that I can understand.
I don't know why they even keep the 'Norton' in the name anymore... Actually, I think they don't? As someone who has dealt with this company at the corporate level for years and years, I have to say that I think all of their products pretty much suck. We have had the option of installing Symantec AV at home for free - I much prefer to use Avast.
Their product is not worth the cost now - since they disabled the "Ad-blocking" feature. It was the best thing I liked about their product - now I have nothing good to say.
This list just sounds like a cheezy PR attempt.
@pianos101:
"I know I'm praying. Though there's still no such thing as spyware on OS X. Every program needs an admin password to install so there is literally zero way for anybody that doesn't have an IQ of 20 to have spyware installed."
Actually, a lot of spyware gets installed during the installation of other software, so the password prompt will not save you. You'll be thinking that you're installing AwesomeScreensavers2008 and type your password in, and BAM you've got adware/spyware.
If they really want Indians answering their phone calls, why not build some call centers on some reservations in the USA? Not every reservation is rolling in casino money.
I used to love Norton products. This was like 8 years or so ago. I quit using Norton software when I began running my computer without it. The start up time was faster and overall performance increased. Norton products are a resource hog. I now just use free alternatives.
They take 1 million calls when the previous volume was only 100,000 calls....
Sounds about right to me, I usually go through about 10 Indian support center agents before I find someone who is capable of deviating from their script long enough to actually fix my problem. :/
Whenever I'm playing an MMORPG and someone else online starts complaining about background processes on their PC slowing or even interrupting their gameplay, the first thing suggested is always "uninstall Norton" because it's usually the culprit. Its popularity to quality ratio is way out of whack.
@pianos101:
"I know I'm praying. Though there's still no such thing as spyware on OS X. Every program needs an admin password to install so there is literally zero way for anybody that doesn't have an IQ of 20 to have spyware installed."
Besides, how would a Mac user know if his machine was infected with spyware. They certainly wouldn't notice the slow down.
@Rupan: That doesn't follow - more calls taken isn't necessarily related to a user spike or repeat callers.
@nytmare:
"the first thing suggested is always "uninstall Norton" because it's usually the culprit. Its popularity to quality ratio is way out of whack."
Same here for any system slow down problem. Uninstall Norton and check the speed again. I used to use Norton Utilities all the time and loved it. Symantec has some of the worst support in the industry. The only time you see an exception is when they acquire another companies product and keep on some of the staff for a while. This usually wears off after the staff wake up and find a better job.
I swore by Norton Utils back in the DOS days.
These days I steer clear. Way clear.
Seems the only way to scrape their stuff out of your machine is to format the damn HD much of the time.
I assisted a new client with cancelling her Symantec subscription last month (due for renewal in July, cancelled in June).
Cancelled via the symantec site, received cancellation confirmations, etc ..
She called me a few days ago to let me know that Symantec had still billed her for the next years subscription. When she called and spoke with a CSR, she was told that what happens on the website isn't passed on to the subscription renewal department ...
Huh. I had no idea these guys were still in business.
7. We enroll you into our Automatic Renewal service on the www.symantecstore.com without giving you the chance to opt-out of enrollment during the purchase process. You have to access the link in the email we send you to disable this enrollment.
I have never understood how companies can do this. I'm giving them permission to use my card ONE TIME when I purchase the product. They should not be allowed to charge my card again UNLESS I give the specific authority to do so.
8. When you get a order refunded, the product/entitlement/subscription is not disabled on the backend. You can continue to use your product as normal without any consequences.
Isn't this unethical?
#6 "They do great work" = saves us a ton of cash. And I do hate the accent. How can I get customer service if I can't understand what they hell they are saying to me?