Acer Customer Service - Support Appalling

Trying to find a solution to the need to repeatedly install / reinstall Flash Player 10 on my AAO 532 running Win 7 and IE8 I joined the official Acer Forum at: http://netbooks-us.custhelp.com/ I created a 'question' for Acer Technical Support describing the problem. In this I quoted the serial no. as on a sticky label on the back of the netbook. The web site's input form accepted this. Within a few hours I got an emailed response from Acer Technical Support stating that the serial no. was wrong (basically inferring that I was a liar) and that the case was now closed as 'solved.' But Acer have my money so I suppose why should they care? So I have now had to resubmit the question - luckily I can copy and paste the original text. I am not happy about the attitude of Acer Support staff - but I will not give up. I have searched the web and others have the same problem with Flash Player, Win7 and IE8. Both Adobe and Microsoft and now Acer have all refused to reply on this problem. That is appalling customer service. Is there a higher authority I can email in Acer to whom I can raise a complaint about their appalling technical support? Thank you.

 

Now I'm told that because the s/w at fault is third party - I mean isn't all s/w third party? - Acer cannot advise even on pre-installed apps. And they still accuse me of not quoting the correct serial no. But I CAN use their "Pay for Support" call service if I wish. Well Acer - your technical support stinks - and judging by the poor grammar in the emailed responses it is obvious that customer / technical support has been out-sourced to some foreign non-English speaking country (guess which one?). Another nightmare.

 

Re: Aver Customer Service - Support Appalling

Hi Chris -

Probably can't help you, but I have both the Flash player 10 ActiveX and Flash Player 10 Plugin working on my Acer 532H with Windows 7 Home Premium with ie 8. This isn't the Windows 7 Starter that came with my Acer, but an upgrade that I bought. Anyway - I am curious what problem you are having, or are you getting some nag message saying that you need to upgrade?

 

Re: Aver Customer Service - Support Appalling

Thank you for your response. No - no nag messages - just that FP 10 keeps becoming uninstalled w.r.t. IE8 whenever I reboot / restart the Acer. Oh - and Windows Media Player 12 has just packed up.

Anyway I got Acer Customer Support (UK) to finally agree that I do indeed have a brand new Acer Aspire One 532 - and that the serial nos., as on the sticky labels underneath it, were indeed correct.

First they suggested that I install IE9 - until I pointed out that it wasn't yet released. Now they have suggested that I need to have a complete diskless (?) re-installation of Windows 7 (Starter) in order to - possibly - solve the problem of having to continualy re-re-install Flash Player 10 for IE8. Nothing like a sledge hammer approach I guess.

Since they have simply replied to my postings (twice) they have now closed the case as 'solved.' If that's the way that they solve issues then they must have a very high success rate - but a lot of unhappy customers. They also suggested that I could call a premium rate (50p a minute) call centre. In other words the technical support team haven't a clue, don't want to have a clue, and can't be ar$ed to research a solution. But then the language, grammer and spelling of their replies strongly indicate that they are based in Asia.

I have also put this problem out onto the Adobe and Microsoft Answers forums. But to date no definitive replies.

My solution is to scrap IE8 altogether. Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera all work with FP 10 - no problems. So I don't need IE8. No wonder its usage is falling worldwide.

Meanwhile Windows Media Player has now packed in with "Server execution failure" - whatever that is. I'm beginning to deeply hate Win 7 and IE8.

CJB.

 

This is the best advise that I've got from Acer technical Support; notice the quaint phrasing, grammar and spelling - definitely not based in the USA or UK.

Response (kamal kiran Yerramilli) 05/12/2010 04:11 AM

Dear Chris Brady,

Thank you for contacting Acer UK. I apologize for the inconvenience that you have experienced.

Regarding the e-mail we have received , to inform you have reached Acer hardware support .

To explain our tool [**] takes every e-mail as solved when we send an reply e-mail to customer . And later once we receive an reply from the customer we get it as updated e-mail . Later once again when we send the customer an updated e-mail, the tool takes the sent e-mail solved.

So every e-mail which we send to customer is marked as solved by tool , that's how the tool was designed .

Having gathered information from the e-mail ,we understand its an software issue.

Further request to call our software support line ,as they handle major software issues.

For further support please e-mail or Call our Acer Premium Support Line on 0906 706 8000.Call costs 50p per minute. [***]

We appreciate your interest in sending us e-mail and will be glad to assist you further to the extent possible.

Respectfully,
Acer UK
Online Technical Support

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[**] This is Acer's customer response 'tool' for responding to enquiries to C. Support; every response is automatically marked as 'solved' even if no solution is proposed or a proposed solution doesn't work.

[***] I don't 'do' 0906... nos. Acer have a damned cheek suggesting this. 50p a minute to be put on hold listening to muzak - I don't think so.

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Don't feel bad... it's an ongoing tech issue worldwide, near as I can tell.

I upgraded my wife's HP touchscreen desktop to 7, and when I did, the HP Touchsmart suite went wonky. I spent about 4 hours trying to track down why it wouldn't upgrade properly, finally got tech support via email... they gave me 2 steps to try, then said, reinstall Windows.

Seriously.

No one knows how anything ties together any more, just restart from scratch...

Talk about the sledgehammer approach.

The only good news is, it did work, so now her's is updated as well.

Best suggestion I have for you is to use Firefox or Chrome. I use Firefox myself on everything I have... IE has been wonky for years for me. I am using Firefox on my desktop right now as I write this, with 7 Ultimate, and it works great.