Trend Micro Innovative Customer Service that Defeats Itself
The quest for perfect anti-virus software continues. I am fond of Kasparsky Labs anti-virus, however after they inexplicably dropped support for Windows XP Pro SP 1 machines (there are plenty of machines out there that SP 2 will throw into chaos) I decided to give Trend Micro Internet Security a try (we didnt solve the XP SP 1 problem with Trend Micro, it was just an impetus to try something different). After a year put to the test, its sad that what I consider a major feature of Trend Micro to be one of its great failures.
Over the course of the 2007, Trend Micro seemed to do exactly what I wanted it to do, though its pop up is more intrusive than Panda Anti-Virus but less so than Kasparsky. What I thought was a very clever feature though of Trend Micro though was built in support for chat support! While many anti-virus companies demand a credit card before talking with you, here is a feature to connect you to a live person to solve your problems when you need it. Too bad it doesn’t work.
You see - about the time that Trend Micro began to give me pop ups that it was only 60+ days left until renewal, it stopped downloading virus patten updates. The log files simply showed that it was unable to connect and suggested an internet connection problem. Nope, no problem there. So I thought this would be the perfect time to try the chat service! Trend Micro thoughtfully placed the chat initialization button right into the side of the main console. I fired this up, filled in my customer information, and started the session.
A minute after the session started, I received a note back asking me to wait for a customer service representative. Another minute - a “Thank you for waiting. A customer service representative will be with you shortly” message appeared. Five minutes later - a follow up message”The session has ended!”. Ill give them a day before we install Panda and replace Trend Micro.
What should be a major selling point of Trend Micro Internet Security - an innovative feature in customer engagement - defeats itself by not following through. Their system is capable of accepting customer feedback of course. There is a valuable lesson here - don’t implement a new, key feature unless you have the bandwidth to follow through and do it right.
