McAfee - Network Associates Inferior and "Buggy" product cost me a lot of business because of McAfee. ripoff Santa Clara California

On 4/5/04 I went to the McAfee website to purchase an upgrade to Virus Scan. I was enticed with Network Security Suite 6.0 that included a firewall, pop-up blocker and spam killer for a special price. I bought it.

I installed it as instructed and had numerous errors and couldn't use my email which is a critical component to my business. Several Live Chat sessions were attempted and due to network problems, I was repeatedly dropped and forced to log back in and start over with a new technician (about 5 times). Since this was not working, I bit the bullet and paid $39.00 for an incident so I could speak to a live person and they could walk me through solving the problem.

From 2:30PM on 4/5 to 1:00PM on 4/7, I spoke to 9 different people who had me restart, re-install, un-install, change the root directory, perform a complete scan (3.5 hours) and a defrag of my drive (5 hours) and again and again and again. Nothing worked and I grew impatient with the poor level of support available (off shore no less in Manilla) so I demanded to have the call escalated to a higher level of tech support. An appointment was made for them to call me at 1:00PM on 4/9 and I patiently waited for an hour. I called back with my Pin Code and was refused access. They have yet to call me back.

During all this, I attempted to file a complaint and asked for a supervisor. I was told they are there to help the technicians and not customers. So I called Customer Support and filed a complaint and demanded that something be done. He laughed at me and said all he could offer was another free support call! I asked for the office of the president and was actually given the Chariman of the Board. So I called and left a detailed message in the "Corporate Voicemail" after being told I could not be transferred to management and they did not have a dept. set up to handle customer satisfaction.

I cut my teeth in the tech industry and I have never experienced such poor customer service in my life. I still do not have the problem resolved, and through all the wasted phone calls to tech support, I at least learned how to remove the product from my system. So I have removed it and purchased a Norton product. I have also requested a refund which I was told I would receive an email with a link to go to another site and agree to the terms before they would give me my money back. Fortunately, I paid with a credit card so I will just write to them and make sure they are debited for the charge!

My advice to anyone even thinking of getting a McAfee product, is don't unless you are very technical savvy and can figure out the problems with the products. Go to Norton or some other reputable company that cares about Customer Service.

Shari
Huntington Beach, California
U.S.A.