brentashley

If you have ever used Groove, you will know that it regularly pops up a notification that there is some new version of a widget or installation helper. You click ok and it grabs it and installs it into your Groove client.

I got one of those notifications last Monday (a week ago today). As is normal, I clicked ok on it, however this time it downloaded a much larger package than usual. It wasn’t until the package finished and required a reboot that it finally came up and told me that I had upgraded from my paid version 2.5 (paid at 2.1 but upgraded to 2.5) to version 3.0, and that I had to either enter a valid 3.0 key or accept that I would now be limited to 3 spaces (I have 5 active spaces) and that various essential features would start to disappear over the next month (file replication for instance) unless I converted my new “Trial” software to a full license.

No problem, thought I, I’ll just contact Groove and have them right this for me, tell me how to downgrade and still use my data.

I consulted their site to get support. I have a login, but I could not find any indication how to actually get support. See if you can tell how to get support for a problem like mine (without paying) from this page: http://www.groove.net/index.cfm/pagename/SupportOptions/

Finally, I used the problem reporting link that I managed to get to from Groove’s help menu and submitted my query from an online form.

After 24 hours with no reply, I sent an email to support@groove.net.

After 24 further hours with no reply, I sent an email to sales@groove.net.

On each of the emails I stressed that I had yet to even receive an acknowledgement of my contact with them.

It has now been a week and I have still yet to hear from them. Not a sausage.

Here is a quote from their support page:

Outstanding customer care is yet another way that we seek to gain your trust in us as a company that can meet your needs. Our support team excels at resolving your issues quickly. Every inquiry is tracked and managed so we can resolve your issues effectively.

I see no evidence of any of the above assertions.

Groove has been a great tool for me, but I’m now looking for alternatives. I can’t consider it a critical tool in my business with service like this. Could you?

What’s up, Ray? I’ve never had any reason to be disappointed till now.

Update
90 minutes after my blog entry, a support message arrived (does someone have an rss search feed that takes higher priority than their email?) detailing how I can uninstall version 3.0, reinstall 2.5 and then restore from an archive.

Being that my last Groove backup is part of a drive image backup, this would entail at minimum a day’s work that could have been avoided had I been presented with a dialog box that clearly said “You are about to upgrade to version 3.0 – Are You Sure?”

I really had consciously decided not to upgrade to version 3.0 until I was ready to and would have declined the offer had it been clear to me.

Clearly, the simplest way out would be for me to pay the $25 or $50 to upgrade (oops – just looked it up. It’ll be $150 to upgrade to the professional edition. not sure what the filesharing edition does but I’d likely lose functionality from 2.5 Standard). I might well have done that a month from now, but I can’t imagine myself doing so with my back against the wall. I suppose that’s stubborn of me but I think I have a point.