I wonder if any of you have the experience of calling an Intuit helpline. I've had to do it 3 times in the past year for problems related to the Quickbooks payroll service. Very simple, straight forward problems. And each time, the same thing. After 20 minutes on hold (they warn you from the start, it's a 20 minute wait), you're connected to someone in an Indian call center who doesn't know the first damn thing about Quickbooks, who fails to understand your problem on the most basic level, and whose grasp of English is sketchy at best. Then they say they're going to have to transfer you to another department. You beg them not to put you on hold again. They say "Don't worry sir, this is a direct transfer. You will be connected immediately." 

So what do they do? Put you on hold. For another 20 freaking minutes. And then the person who answers also does not understand your problem. They don't even know the most basic stuff about Quickbooks. Then he says "we cannot help you here sir. We're going to have to transfer you back to the first department you spoke to." You beg them, no no no no no, you're just going to put me on hold for 20 minutes and then the person there will tell me that I need to speak to your department. "No sir. I am telling you this is not the case. We will transfer you immediately and I will stay on the line and speak to the representative and explain your problem (that I didn't even understand myself)."

So what do they do? Put you on hold. AGAIN. For another 20 freaking minutes. And then the person who answers speaks even worse English, and has been told nothing about your problem. You're back to square one. So out of curiosity, you ask them a very simple question which would demonstrate that they have a very basic level of understanding of the software in question. They say "I am going to have to speak to a supervisor sir. It will be two minutes. I hope you don't mind me putting you on hold." 

So I'm on hold once again. This time, after 20 minutes, they simply disconnected me. In all, I'd wasted one hour and twenty minutes with this crap. The previous time I called, last November, they put me through the same musical chairs BS for TWO HOURS, including a disconnection midway through which meant I had to start from scratch. 

I can't remember how much I pay for this subscription, but it's something in the region of $500/yr. I've heard people complain about Cakewalk's customer service, but NOTHING I say NOTHING comes close to Intuit. No tech support at all would be better than wasting over an hour of my time being passed around like a hot potato by these ignorant morons. Rant rant rant. I honestly believe that Intuit is quite literally the worst company in the world. 

Weird.  I've had to call them before and got a nice, English speaking American.  Maybe it's just another way they like to "service" people from New York?

Did you call regarding Quickbooks Payroll? Because each time I've gotten the Indian techs. 

I doubt it, we never made enough money to have payroll...

Well I make enough money to have payroll....but then it just gets sucked into the payroll and distributed to the workers, the IRS and the state of New York and I barely see a penny of it.  Funny how these things work isn't it 

zungle


 
 
I've been running Quickbooks Pro since  1993, before that I ran DAC...(old school pc based accounting)..........
 
I run every aspect of my company thru QBP............AR,AP,PayRoll ,L&I,Simple retirment,Un-employment insurance,State Revenue,
 
WE/I  do everything in house except Annual, Corporate  and personal Income tax filing.
 
I do all of the updates and take care of support issues........
 
All in all I believe Intuit customer service to be pretty good and the product is excellent.
 
I have experienced the outsourced customer service on more than one occassion but they were more than up to the task of helping me out.
 
Being an U.S. born, English speaking caucasion  likely gave me some prejudice going into my first encounter.
 
However with some thought and humble pie,
 
 I've grown to understand the world doesn't revolve around me.
 
Thus the out sourced customer service doesn't excite me nearly as much.
 
Good Luck I hope you get it fixed.........
 
 

You're lucky to have had a good experience! Because horror stories of Intuit's tech support abound, and they are usually very similar to mine, i.e. being passed around from department to department with long hold times, to speak to people who insist that the problem is not something their department can deal with. One of the women I spoke with yesterday didn't even know what a "portable company file" was. 


When I first started using QB Payroll, I was given some extremely inaccurate advice by an Intuit tech support which led to a couple of nasty IRS fines. Of course when I called to complain, they denied ever having given me that advice. 


Their business practices leave a very nasty taste with a lot of people. For instance, I have no problem whatsoever with a company discontinuing support for an old product. But when they actually disable functionality in a product so that you're forced to upgrade...like for instance I was quite happy with QB 2007, until they disabled the ability to email invoices from the program. I ended up having to upgrade to 2011. 

I used to work in a call center in Quebec where there was an Intuit support department. 

The odd thing is that this particular (relatively small) department had the most culturally-diverse staff of all, i.e., people w/ a strong accent in both english AND french (which isn't all that common in Quebec city).

http://www.networkedlawyers.com/internet-defamation-claims-on-the-rise-as-online-reviews-impact-the-bottom-line/

(Is that why Rain keeps putting me on hold?)