I received a phone call from Adobe today. It was coincidence and had nothing to do with my previous rant. The person who called me was a Level 2 technician. I went through my story with him. The difference was that he was an installation expert. In the end, he couldn't help me because I refused to reinstall until I had a new serial number. He agreed to put a note in my ticket that he recommended because he determined by talking to me I wasn't trying to scam a serial number off of Adobe. Yes, he said that. I do give him credit for acknowledging I've been through the ringer, but he was not about to concede anything negative about Adobe support, but I got the feeling he agreed.

Now I have to call Adobe Customer Service and beg them to please bestow on me a new serial number.

I'm done with this. I was contacted by somebody from Madcap today. I'm going to give Flare a try. At this point I either switch products or risk a mental health crisis.

I'm a technical writer. Have been for more than 15 years.  I have used FrameMaker since it was at version 2 and was owned by company called Frame. I have owned RoboHELP Since the early days of Blue Sky Software who used to spam my work fax with "specials". Both Blue Sky and Frame eventually found their way into Adobe's family of products.

Words cannot describe how much I love FrameMaker. I use(d) it to write everything, including mundane office dribble because I love structured documents and Microsoft Word has turned a once usable interface into tabbed hieroglyphics. RoboHELP on the other hand is now just Robohelp and hasn't changed much in years. It's not the best documentation solution, but it beats many others and has some cool features strapped onto it by Macromedia before Adobe ate them too.

Why People Hoard Violent Hostility Before Driving Home

Last August, I noticed that my installed, and perfectly functional, Adobe Technical Communication Suite 1.0 was working fine one day and the next day the serial number stopped working. This was because some update made Adobe Captivate reject my serial number. This happened on both my desktop and my laptop.

I thought I would call Adobe support. Looking back, I now see the folly of my youth and inexperience. I miss the old carefree me who doesn't cook blood-boiling hatred for Adobe's customer support methods and people.

Naturally, the support is in India. I'm okay with Indian support as long as the company they represent actually empowers them to do things. From what I've experienced, Adobe has empowered their Indian call centers to say "no" with various inflections as well as transferring me back and forth between customer service and technical support.  I have been told I need to pay for support. I have been told I need to completely reload all of my Adobe software. I have been told that I should know why my serial number doesn't work.

And Time Flies

Starting in August I called several times to kick-off a mind-numbing cycle of ignorant troubleshooting. My complaint is the serial number stopped working. I upgraded to Tech Comm Suite 1.3, hoping for a new serial number and never received one.  I'm told the old one will work for 1.3, but alas, it's not that easy. Adobe support's response to all of this is to have me uninstall and reinstall everything over and over for the next few months. Seeing how this is a suite of products, I spend more time following "Steve's" broken English instructions than I do getting real work done.

So now it's January 2009. Obama will be sworn in soon. Yet I am not getting Hope or Change from Adobe. We're still going back and forth on the phone. People say they will call me back and never do. I can't even guess as to how many call-backs were promised to me that just didn't happen.

I used to sing Adobe's praises for all to hear. InDesign is my publication designer. Dreamweaver is my prototyping and quick site building workhorse. However, FrameMaker is the ultimate documentation tool for me. Robohelp is a great addon that helps me just give customers what they want.

It's not like I don't want to be an Adobe customer. It's more like they resent that I still live and breath after I buy the product. This particular problem, from what I understand, is not uncommon. Damn that man who keeps calling and whining about his serial number.  Damn him back to FrameMaker 5.5 and don't let him upgrade again, they say.

You Can't Fight City Hall

With every call, I'm polite and I understand that each person at Adobe tech support is special in their own way. I'm sure "Ron", who was kind enough to hang up on me "accidentally" just needs a hug. And there was "Annona" who was very stern in insisting I had to pay for support to fix my serial number.  I don't yell at these people. Special people need a special place so they aren't operating machinery.

If I could affford it, I'd move to MadCap Sofware. They seem to have some interesting products. I would like to try their Robohelp and FrameMaker killers, Flare and Blaze.

But the expense of software conversion for small independents like me is enough to cause marital problems.

I'll stay with Adobe, but I'm angry with their support and I'm more angry that they know their support sucks and they are not taking steps to correct it. Maybe they're jonsing for a future bailout. Who knows.

I just know that after 6 months, I have an unresolved issue with a serial number for a product I've purchased and then upgraded. I've been treated as if I don't matter to Adobe and I can't use the software I purchased.  Thanks Adobe! I can now have a blog post about it.

Being an ex-banker who used to work for an excessively customer-focused bank, I felt like the survey reported in this article was an obvious waste of time and money.

Banks must provide customers with convenience, value and service in order to strengthen customer loyalty and stimulate growth, according to a new report from Deloitte's Banking practice. "Particularly in major metropolitan markets, many banks are competing for the same group of customers," says Toby Kilgore, principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP, in a statement. "To be successful, banks must differentiate themselves from the pack by providing a distinctive customer experience that captures customers' hearts and minds. Convenience will help attract new customers, but banks need to provide service and value in order to build loyalty, mitigate attrition and achieve significant top-line growth."

Oh, so customers will go where they are treated well? Who'd have thought that?

I live in Texas but have customers in Arkansas, Chicago, and other areas of the country. That's why I opened an account at Bank of America. My partners also opened an account there to cover our business needs. I have a lot of experience with nationwide banks. They are so convenient when you travel for ATMs and helping out in a pinch. However, that's where the convenience ends.

"Customer service" is one of those business terms flung about without any real meaning. Is customer service greeting all customers with a smile? Sure. Is it still customer service when the same smiling person is telling me "no"? That's been my experience at Bank of America. They have a software system for deposits that will automatically put deposits on hold if the account and deposit doesn't meet certain standards. Theoretically, this makes sense because banks do lose a lot of money from bad deposits and fraud. I worked at a bank for six years and I'm very familiar with the risks that banks take as well as the costs related to running an efficient bank. However, this software system does one thing to Bank of America, it turns branch employees into nay-saying drones.

Customer service is more than just greeting people and performing policy-based pre-approved tasks. It's making sure a customer is happy with the end-result of any interaction. That is not easy because customers are hard to please and they demand a lot, but it's their money and they should. It's easy to forget that customers are people. Executive management sits in meeting rooms and discuss customers as part of demographics, market share, and profit and loss statements. It dehumanizes customers in a way similar to Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs calls his victims "it".

"It puts the lotion on." or "It puts the money in the bank." Same thing.

This is important because as soon as companies see customers as either negative or positive dollar signs, they forget that they are people.

This brings me back to Bank of America. I'm not user-familiar with their banking software, which I think was developed by Siebel. However, I am familiar as a customer who hears that my funds are on hold again quite a bit. Most deposits I make at Bank of America are automatically placed on hold for five to ten business days (mainly because I'm a new customer). No amount of me personally seeing the branch manager or verifying the funds seem to help. The tellers and customers service reps just look at me with doe eyes and say it's the computer's fault.

Since when did technology become the rule-maker? Over and over, businesses are taking important things like customer service and common business sense and making them subservient to technology. I don't think the IT people at Bank of America designed their implementation of the software with hurting customer service in mind. What they did do was listen to a bean-counter tell them that there have been too many losses over the years due to bad deposits and that can be controlled by the software.

There are other ways to keep bad deposits out of a branch. They include training people for one thing. Well-trained tellers can catch a lot of fraud or potentially bad deposits. I know this because I worked for a bank for six years, starting out as a teller. I caught fraudulent checks by looking at body language and applying our well-tested policies. What was unique about our bank was that tellers were given the power to override funds, make decisions about deposits, and use our best judgement. That bank was eventually became part of U.S. Bank. Now they are experts at counting beans and telling customers "no".

"It takes the money from the ATM or it pays to see a teller."

Yes, running a big business is hard. But when people who run big companies forget that they are there because other people pay them for goods and services, customers are nothing more than a dot in a spreadsheet. The companies of the future who can keep the human element alive when making technology and business decisions will crush their competition. I think a change is coming in banking which will drive that point home. Watch as the big banks can't squeeze anymore out of their cold calculations and cost cutting and then try to figure out why the smaller, local banks are eating away at their market share.