Customer Service

James Mills > Blog > Customer Service

Once upon a time I paid for a service called Humyo. Not such a long time ago this company was bought by Trend Micro and is now called SafeSync. When the company was small and called Humyo the support staff were great. I like to think I was part of a select few users who were technically minded and were a select few users who were in constant contact with the Humyo development team providing feedback about the product. In fact I got some time free on my account because of the feedback I provided.

SafeSync is an online sync/backup service. Yes you could use Dropbox or any one of the other hundreds of other offerings out there but the fact is SafeSync is actually unique. It works very well and you can pair folders. I have been using it for years and it now has 80GB+ of my data all backed up. I can sleep at night and I am happy.

What I am not happy about is the way that the customer service is dealt with. When you use the client (currently on Mac) it uses files called state files that log the status of the sync process. It logs what it has synced etc. If these files become out of sync then the icon that is displayed becomes stuck. Basically when you backup/sync a folder it will display a sync icon until it is actually fully synced (backed up) and then it will display a tick. Some times it will get stuck and display the wrong icon. It should not, but it does.

In my past experience with Humyo and the software you have to remove the state files and then restart the application and it will go though the indexing again and it will sort itself out. I have recently moved to a mac and I have downloaded the newest SafeSync client app and got it installed and all synced up. Recently for whatever reason the icon in the top right hand of my screen got stuck in sync mode. I thought that this would not be a problem because I knew how to fix this. So I went on the hunt for the state files. I found them but I could not understand what was going on because there were no files on the mac like there were on the PC. I emailed Trend Support, nothing.

Like with everything now-a-days I got in contact with the company on Twitter using  @TrendMicro @TrendMicroUK@SafeSync and it tok a long long long time for them to get back to me. When they did they said someone would be in contact with me this Monday and if they had not I should remind them. On Wednesday I reminded them. I got a shoddy reply from their technical support staff, a typical technical support reply. It was absolutely a complete waist of time. The attached video shows why.

I wish companies would spend the time to reply to customers in greater detail. Give them the time and respect they deserve. After all I am a paying customer who has been using this product for some time now. I have recommended the product to others and I have got others to sign up to use the service.

Wach the video I recorded for them by clicking below…

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