Iomega, Class Act or Class Action?: A Continuing Study Into How Iomega Treats Its Customers
Iomega, Class Act or Class Action?: A Continuing Study Into How Iomega Treats Its Customers
When I buy a warranted product and invest a great deal of time in making it work, only to be told that I can return it if I can not make it work, that does not compensate me for time lost. When that happens to me, I consider such lost time to have been stolen, if I could not get good support from the manufacturer or vendor of the product in question.
Although I have personally been extremely pleased with the Iomega Zip drive that I have had working well for more than a year, I decided against buying an Iomega Jaz drive simply because I could not readily get Iomega to answer simple questions about compatibility issues related to their product, in advance. Heck, I couldn't even get a real person to answer their phones!
Since launching this Web page, I have heard from a user who paid $400 for an Iomega drive and who now refuses to pay $20 per call for the technical support required from Iomega to make the drive work. He feels cheated. I would, too.
I really got angry when Iomega told me by USPS mail that I could download their Zip Tools 5.0 from their Web site, but I found that this was virtually impossible to do. As they also offered to sell the same software, I saw this as a bait-and-switch fraud, and said so to the Arizona Office of the Attorney General. They forwarded my complaint to the Utah Office of the Attorney General, who confronted Iomega with it. All that is detailed, below. (So far, I have not sent my complaint to the U.S. Postmaster General.)
Since launching this site, I have heard from people whose reactions have run the gamut from "Bravo!" to "Get a life!" (at least three of those, so far). Oh well, "Such is life," and "Life goes on."
It turns out that at least ONE of the "Get a life" responses seems to have been motivated by a fear that I am out to put Iomega out of business. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I just want them, and other computer companies, to treat users fairly. Is that asking too much?
What is important to me is not what you think of me, but that, if you have had problems of your own with user support, you decide to DO something about it. If you have already been doing something about such stuff, my hat is off to you. But, I feel that if more people were already to have carried their own weight, in these regards, there would be no possible excuse for the existence of this site.
If you want to do something effective to improve support of computer users by computer manufacturers and vendors, then please read on!
Here is a letter I received on 30 November 1996 (I have not been posting much, lately):
"I here complaints from people like you everyday working for in tech support for a major pc manufacturer. A lot of the stuff I here makes sense and would piss me off too if I were the customer, and a lot of it is just plain lack of common sense that makes me want to slap some people upside the head. Ya know what I mean? I dont have any direct experience as a customer or in support with a specialty device manufacturer like Iomega, but I do get a lot of call from people trying to install their damn ZIP drives. I saw cases where the Win95 software they provided just didnt want to "automatically" install via the setup GO95 or whatever the hell it is program, and I had to go into device manager and install it that way. And that is just a problem I've dealt with the parallel version. GOD HELP those poor people who have the SCSI version and still dont know where their reset button is! I agree IOMEGA should provide better PHONE support, hearing that they charge you from custmomers I deal with pisses me off, because I have to end up supporting their product. It's not a very complex device to install, but if you run into one problem that strays from the way it's supposed to go in the manual they provide, you are screwed, especially if you are a novice. I had a call where I spent an hour with a customer on the phone, getting their ZIP drive to work, because IOMEGA convinced them the problem was in the paralÿïlel port that came with the computer, and not the installation software they provided. I hate when they say that! I finally got it to work, after hunting for clues in readme.txt files and .hlp files provided with the driver, . Well enough with this. If you can get IOMEGA just not to charge for a phone call then that will be an accomplishment. I mean they are probably never going to provide 24/7 tech support or even anything close, and ya gotta understand that, there is just not a reall need for it. The setup for their devices is really minimal in my opinion and it would be wastfull to provide support of that caliber."
Here are two more letters, both received on 4 December 1996:
"Subject: Suggestion "Get a life. People like you make me laugh, always thinking the world is against them. "LOL. "and
"Subject: ZIP troubles you might not know about... "(Please withold my e-mail address from general postings) "Howdy."I am a small "mom and pop" style computer consulting company operating in Atlanta. We resell ZIP and JAZ drives on occassion, and have had our share of problems much like you describe. Because of the nature of the services we offer, we have solved or worked around any problems as they came up, except one:
"We use two ZIP drives internally to transfer data between customer machines (when applicable), and also to temporarily hold customer data when we perform delicate operations (that could cause data loss) on their machines. This temporary storage is what got us into trouble.
"We had a computer with a badly corrupt partition table. Before risking NDD on the drive, we backed up what data that was accessible (including important financial files) to a ZIP drive. We worked from a DOS prompt using GUEST and XCOPY - pretty simple, right? The transfer took twnety minutes or so and appeared to go fine, and we had done this same procedure hundreds of times before.
"NDD, as we expected, ruined what was left of the partition table. We repartitioned and reformatted the drive, then went to copy the information from the ZIP disk... "Invalid Format" error. We tried to access the disk a dozen different ways, but could not get any computer to see it. We sent e-mail to iomega (after realizing telephone support is non-existent) and got a response that said, in essence:
1. Yes, this happens sometimes. 2. No, there is nothing you can do about it. 3. ZIP disks should be reformatted every few months to maintain their integrity. 4. Bad ZIP disks may accept data written to them without error messages, but will not be able to reproduce that data."#3 was particularly distressing to us, since some of our customers took the advice on the ZIP box and use ZIP disks for important data backup and archive purposes. Apparently ZIP disks are very dangerous for any sort of long-term storage.
"What's interesting about this is that, in searching much of your page as well as Robs, I don't find mention of this. I know the iomega page doesn't mention it. Granted this isn't the sort of thing you *want* to tell thousands of customers, but isn't there an obligation to do so?
"Keep up the good work.
"-Chip"
To which of those last two letters should I give the greater credence?
By the way, you might like to visit "Seatbelts for School Buses"
Thank you for your interest!
©Stephen A. Langford, Oro Valley, Arizona, 26 February 1997. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This document may be freely transmitted in its entirety, so long as no monies are earned during the transaction/s. Permission is required for any and all other pertinent circumstances.
(Metering for this page begun 26 February 1997.)