Annals of Quality

We had bought a laptop in 2009.  It was purchased at Best Buy and configured with a few add ons by the Geek Squad: their technical services and support arm.  They loaded Windows and Kaspersky 2010, a virus protection software.  Every year on June 23rd,  the Kaspersky software subscription had to be renewed with an online payment.  As the software was originally bought and installed by the Geek Squad, the annual subscription payment was made on Kaspersky portal on their web page.

On June 22, 2014, it was time to renew the subscription.  When the button to renew in the software home page was clicked, an error message popped up saying that the webpage was invalid and to try to connect manually.  The manual approach yielded the same result.  It was starting to get frustrating.  Going to the Geek Squad and Kaspersky websites yielded only slightly better results.  Neither had any login information for us.  New accounts were created but when asked for the product pin they would only accept with one more digit than ours.  Neither Kaspersky nor the Geek Squad wanted to acknowledge our customer status.  The only thing we could do was buy new software.

Clearly, our version so Kaspersky, the 2010 version, had be "end of lifed."  They were neither supporting it any longer nor were they even recognized long time customers who were using it.  They did not make it clear, easy, or convenient to understand the situation and they certainly did not provide any options to proceed.  When the renew link was activated, they should have had a simple and clear message that said:  “Your version of Kaspersky Virus Protection is no longer being supported.  We are pleased to offer you an upgrade to Kaspersky 2014 that provides the features you were used to along with new and exciting features that include (and then these features should have been bulleted out).  Click here to proceed, our installation wizard will walk you through the process to remove your old version of Kaspersky and install Kaspersky 2014.”

We would have done this, felt well served, paid to renew, and continued on as a loyal Kaspersky customer.  Because of the way they handled it, we were not a happy Kaspersky customer and other options were explored including MacAfee, Eset, and Norton.  As it turns out, our internet service provider, Comcast, provides the Norton Security Suite gratis to all Comcast customers that meet a certain criteria of Comcast products used and expenditure.  We qualified.  It was a no brainer.  We were moving ahead with Norton.  Kaspersky lost a customer.

On top of all this, the Norton Suite was super easy to download.  It was very straightforward and fast.  The software was intuitive to use and provided way more services than Kaspersky 2010.  Probably Kaspersky 2014 was comparable but they did not see any need to inform us and try in any way to retain our business.  

This was poor quality on the part of Kaspersky.  We were happy with their software.  For years, it did what it was supposed to do and what we paid for.  It was the quality and difficulty of this most recent renewal process that has disgruntled us… and this disgruntled customer just blogged about it.