Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Palm just doesn't give a damn about it's customers

That was made very clear today when I tried to contact someone at Palm about the fact that their new forum registration is broken for those who were previously registered to use the palm forums. I completed the first step of the process, confirming my email and my user name. The palm forums, powered by lithium.com, are "new" and in order to use the new palm forums, previous uses have to jump through some hoops to be able to do so.

After receiving the 'welcome' message via email with the link to verify my information, I filled out the remaining fields that were not already pre-populated (my user name and my email address). I put in a new password, checked the boxes to indicate that I'm over 13 years of age and that I agree to the terms of service. I click on "submit" and the form just comes back to itself, the password fields empty and no error messages.

After 24 hours, I decided to call palm. That turned out to be a huge mistake. First of all, no one at palm wants to talk to a palm customer. So they make finding any phone number difficult. Next, they force you through a stupid question and answer session to "get you to the correct department". Only one problem, there is no department for your website is broken. And so, as to be expected, the packi's on the other end have no clue about the palm website and all they can do is say "try it again in three hours". Yea, that was really helpful.

I tried calling corporate relations, I actually spoke to someone for whom English is not a second language. Problem again, they knew nothing about the website and said there is no one they can refer me to resolve this issue. So it seems that some phantom web development team swooped in from out of the blue, put this site online and vanished, never to be seen from again. So what's the friggin' point of having this "support" section if it cannot be used without setting up a brand new account, using a different email address? Now most of you will probably say, "well, why not just do that?" The answer is because I have one main email address that I use and I don't want to have to bounce here and there to read my email messages.

The real problem is that palm really does not really care about its customers. If you're a prospective customer, they'll court you but once you spend the cash, all you'll hear are crickets.

So I guess this is my final wake up call to throw away the palm tx and buy a windows based pda. I like my tx, but not at the expense of being treated like a leper because I'm a customer.

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