Jeff bought a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 4 back in May during a sale promising a $200 discount. The final checkout price didn’t reflect the discount, but he double-checked the terms and conditions and confirmed that he was eligible. Adobe agreed, and has repeatedly promised to issue a refund. Jeff has been waiting for the check for almost four months, and he’s not alone. Another customer has been waiting on a similar refund for almost a year!

Jeff writes:

For nearly four months, I’ve been having an ongoing struggle to get a $200 dollar refund for an overcharge from Adobe. A quick search online reveals that I’m not alone.

I have a small video production company, and I purchased a CS4 Production Studio upgrade on the last day of a sale. It was after Support hours but well before midnight. The Website didn’t reflect the sale price (a $200 difference), but I purchased it figuring I could get a refund with no problem. That proved to be a big mistake.

After 2 or 3 calls of generally clueless reps with unbelievably poor English language skills, they recognized the over-charge and approved to the refund. That was at the beginning of May! By mid July, after many more phone calls in which the refund was promised within the next business cycle, I finally got fed up and asked for a full refund. I faxed the Letter of Destruction as requested, and as of now, that refund hasn’t even been processed yet.

I am so incredibly frustrated, all I wanted was to pay the sale price as advertised. The Adobe software itself is great, and I really didn’t want to relinquish my nice legal copies, but this has been among the worst customer service I’ve ever experienced. From what I’ve read elsewhere, this seems to be a systemic problem with Adobe. I am normally a firm believer in paying for the hard work that goes into quality software development, but as it stands right now I will never BUY another Adobe product again.

Another customer has a similar complaint:

We’re currently involved in an ongoing 8 month hassle with Adobe over a simple refund. We have been promised a check three different times, all of which required us to wait about 2 months for our check to appear. This says nothing of the literal hours we have spent on hold waiting to get a person to “resolve” this.

Each time we have been asked for a different bit of info, and we have complied with each request sending it email, fax, and postal service. They will not contact you if something is missing — they just wait for you to call them after another 2 months has gone past adding another two mos. of interest charges to pay your credit card folks. Now they want a piece of paper we were never sent as a requirement to give us our money back.

Ideally Adobe would pony up the promised refund. Depending on your credit card company, you may still be able to file a chargeback. If you can’t, skip past Adobe’s outsourced customer service and deal directly with their corporate office. Load up an Executive Email Carpet Bomb using the contact information from this post.

Adobe [Customer Service Scoreboard]

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.