I have my share of horror stories with customer service–especially phone and cable companies–but I just had a very nice experience with Adobe customer service. I explained my problem a couple of days ago in Possible hard lesson from Adobe. I’m thrilled to say that the call from the supervisor ended with me being able to upgrade the entire suite for an upgrade price (happy, happy). It’s being shipped to me with the expedited shipping fee waived (joy, joy). And I’ll get a refund for the money I already spent when I attempted to upgrade only DW to version CS3 (happy, happy, joy, joy). The phone call was brief, the people were polite. Adobe just set the bar for customer service as far as I’m concerned. Makes me proud to once again lay claim to my title of Community Expert for my local Adobe users group.
Month: June 2007
Captions for Video with Flash CS3
Don’t miss this great article by Tom Green at Digital Web Magazine about Captions for Video with Flash CS3. Tom’s been the leading the field in making sure people could create captions in Flash for some time now, and he’s updated the information for Flash CS3.
Possible hard lesson from Adobe
This morning I attempted to open Dreamweaver only to see a message that my trial version had expired. No way to get into the help screen to enter serial numbers, no joy anywhere.
Here’s the backstory. I worked with Peachpit Press a while back doing a tech edit on a Dreamweaver book. They provided a trial version of Dreamweaver CS3 so I could do my job. When the job was finished, I put the trial app in my trash (a Mac method of uninstalling, for you Windows users who doin’t know what I’m talking about). Then I went to Adobe and purchased a brand new, all my own, upgrade to Dreamweaver CS3 for $200. I download, install, send in the serial numbers to validate, and go from there.
Okay, back to this morning and the non-working Dreamweaver. I called Adobe and it seems that you cannot upgrade a suite—in this case Studio 8—by individual product. In other words, since my previous product was a suite, I can only get an upgrade on the suite. Individual products are individual products are individual products are individual products. They are not suites. Thirty days have passed since I bought it, so no refund. My apparent only option is now to upgrade the suite for another $500 and chalk the $200 I spent earlier up to
- my own stupidity, or
- Adobe’s inadequate communications about upgrades
I’m scheduled to talk to a supervisor at Adobe, but I don’t think I’m going to come away happy from this one. If I do, I’ll let you know.
It’s showtime
Two weeks in Greece on Flickr.