I have to say that Adobe takes the cake as the most inept company in the US, along with AT&T. I filed my application for the free upgrade from CS5.5 in early May, right away they asked me for the invoice, even though I had sent them PDFs of the order confirmation, and shipping confirmation which had all the information they needed, but OK, I went to my account on B&H and downloaded the invoice on PDF and sent that to Adobe. Several weeks went by and no news. In late May I sent them an inquiry through the open case they had opened for me, and they replied that they were working on it. Several days later I called, but their phone menu system is obviously designed to wear people out and get nowhere, so I started a chat online with one of their "agents". This was two Saturdays ago.
As usual I was greeted with a lot of fake politeness that those poor Indian guys are forced to shower the customer with to the point of making you sick, and the guy, after requesting my information told me that my upgrade had been approved and I was going to have it ready within 24 hours. 72 hours later and still no email or any news, so I started another chat, and this guy told me that he approved my order and that it was going to be ready again in 24 hours. Two days later, still no order link, and they close the case saying that the order had been closed and that "The order is currently processing and the download will be available in your Adobe account in 24-48 hours."
Well, two days later still no order, so again another frustrating chat session with another very polite Indian guy (I don't mean that in a demeaning way, since I like Indian people very much), who again told me that my order was going to be ready in 24 hours.
Yesterday after work, still no order, so another pointless chat session with lots of apologizing and condescending and the assurance that he was going to "escalate" this to a superior.
Absolutely fed up I called their number to see if I could -very naively of me, I admit- reach someone at their headquarters that could actually give me my serial number and download link.
After talking and being placed on hold by another guy in India, and adding another 20 minutes of wasted time to the already over two hours I wasted on chat sessions, the guy came back to tell me that he was going to investigate further and call me back, which he never did.
Today, well over a month after I submitted all the requested paperwork, and weeks after most people are happily using Adobe CS6, I'm still waiting for the upgrade I was promised.
The only other time I had to deal with such an extreme level of ineptitude was a year ago with AT&T. Different products, but same terrible customer service, and the obvious realization that these are really chaotic companies where the different departments don't communicate at all with each other, or do so very poorly. I don't blame those poor Indian guys that are probably overworked and underpaid, I blame the American executives that outsource their support to other countries, force them to be unbearably polite to where they actually waste a lot of your time saying "thank you", "I apologize" and repeating what you tell them a million times, and basically read from a script.
In other words, I'm really fed up with Adobe. I understand the fact that they have a lot of these upgrades to process and that takes time. But I'm fed up with their reps telling me that my upgrade is going to be ready in 24 hrs and ten days later it's not, and they keep telling me that over and over. That's just plain bad customer service.
