Veep Drinking Game

4Team Corp Sync2 Review

fail
Last year I bought this service from a company called 4Team that allows people using outlook to sync email calendars with the software. It worked okay and cost 40 bucks at the time and included one year of support.

I'm assuming you can see where this is going.


I used the product for a year with no issues and then bought a new computer. I went to move everything to the new computer and of course, wasn't able to activate the software. Thinking I merely needed to deactivate it on the old computer, I contacted support.


Me : Hi. I'm moving from one computer to another and when i enter my activation code I get an error that the activation has failed. I'm assuming this means it needs to be deactivated on the old computer in some way?


Support: Please hold on, I will transfer you to our sales department as they are dealing with activations. You will not need to retype your query.

Please wait while I transfer the chat to the best-suited site operator.

Support 2 : As I can see from your account, your subscription for the software updates and technical support expired on 9/29/2016. In order to activate the newest version, license must be valid. You can extend it by purchasing a license upgrade. Extension price is 24.98 EUR. Would you like to acquire it and receive a purchase quote?


Me : I'd prefer not to as I don't really consider moving from one computer to another a necessary reason to pay for support. you would think that would be something that is a common task people would do. I'm fine with my current version. I don't need the new one I just want it to work on my new computer in the same way it works on the old one


He goes on to tell me that they are only supporting the current version of the software. If I happened to save the original version I had I could use that (without support of course), but since I didn't save the original downloaded installation file I'm S.O.L.


Support 2: Sorry for the inconvenience, but our licensing policy, as well as EULA, states that we provide free support and software updates free for one year after the purchase. Your scenario is considered support case, therefore it's necessary to purchase a license upgrade.


Me Like I said I don't want to new version, just to use the one I already have.


Support 2 : I completely understand how this can be a tough situation for you and I sincerely apologize for this. However, policies are determined at a higher level and we are left with the enforcement of it. Here is a direct link to our licensing policy: http://4team.biz/Help.aspx#Licensing.


Many years ago I worked customer service at AT&T and whenever we found a customer annoying about stuff like this we would respond with, "It's in our terms and conditions. Did you read the terms and conditions?" because of course no one ever had. But I would rarely ever do this and often try to help my customers out. Sometimes this would involve creative workarounds, because as they say a happy customer sometimes tells people about the good service but are way more likely to tell people about the bad service. It seems more and more that the point of having customer service is less and less necessary as there is no service involved, there is only, "the policy in front of me tells me to do this, and the people in charge say to only do this." As AI becomes better, I can see this being one of the areas it will move into, as it is not like an actual person does anything different than a machine would.


So instead of providing some workaround or more than 10% off the subscription price, they lost a customer. As there are more companies out there that do the same thing, and for the creative free workarounds. And it gives a cranky monkey something to blog about.