I want to document my horrible experience with Adobe Systems, Inc. customer and tech support.
I purchased Adobe Acrobat 9.0 Standard upgrade from Adobe's online store in September of 2008. I have the program installed on my Windows Vista Home Premium laptop and previously had it on a Windows XP Professional computer. I then removed it from that computer and installed in on a new Windows XP computer. That hard drive crashed. When trying to install on the new hard drive using Windows Vista Business I received the error that I had the product on too many computers. I contacted customer support who after three phone calls suggested I
install the Adobe Acrobat 6.0 first. Then the message I received when installing the program was that the serial number was invalid.
I contacted the customer service and tech support for Adobe about 11 times over the last two weeks and did not have a resolution until now. Tech support, after being on the phone with them for 2 hours at a time, said it was a customer service problem, customer service said it was a tech problem.
I was on the phone four times with tech support - used Windows Installer Utility, CS3 Cleaner Utility (level 2 and 4), deleted cache.pcd, reinstalled, uninstalled, and did just about everything I could think of - and still no resolution to the problem. Tech support sent me back to customer support three times and then customer support sent me back to tech support. I know I was a difficult customer to deal with. That was because of my frustration at having to call so many times, having to answer the same questions over and over again, and not getting any satisfaction. Most of the techs asked the same question they just asked me, like they were reading from a script and when I tried to ask questions other than what was on their script, they had to start over with their reading.
At one point I was told to connect directly to the internet through my modem and not my router. I tried it, but could figure out why that would cause the problem. One tech suggested that my MAC address was the problem.
I was sent to so many different areas of tech support that my head was spinning. Each person, in their Indian accent, would assure me that they would be the one to get this resolved for me. Then when they couldn't figure it out, they sent me back to customer service. Customer service then sent me back to tech support. What a miserable run-around.
I was able to finally install the Acrobat 9.0 Standard program after one of the techs finally said something that made sense to me. We renamed the Flexnet folder and that stopped the invalid serial number problem. Why this wasn't suggested to me on the first or second time I called tech support is beyond me.
This is the worst tech and customer support that I have ever dealt with.
I lodged a complaint against Adobe with the San Jose BBB so that Adobe will be aware of the horrible experience I had with their customer service and tech support.
