Sage ACT!'s horrible customer service

We usually get called in when some piece of technology has gone horribly wrong for someone and they're in a tough spot until it's fixed. Often these situations are caused by serious defects in a piece of software or hardware, and we'll end up trying to work with the developer or manufacturer to resolve the issue on our client's behalf. Since we've got a strong technical background, we're generally able to "talk tech" with technical support people and get problems resolved more quickly.

That is, when the companies behind those defective products are at all interested in supporting their customers.

Unfortunately, we often find ourselves dealing with companies that don't care about their product or their customers -- at least, once the initial sale is made.

We've been dealing with Sage for over a week now. Their technical support is awful. They might be one of the worst companies I have ever dealt with; they are certainly one of the worst companies I have dealt with recently. I'm not sure how else to describe just how absymal their customer support has been, other than to say, I would rather be dealing with AT&T.

Our client had two computers set up in a small office with a Sage Act! client-server setup. At some point in the past our client had upgraded from the 2009 version of Act to the 2012 version. Their server system then got infected with a virus, and another company was called in to try to clear that up. That got botched pretty badly and their server system was left in a very unstable state, with (for example) various Windows services unable to start, permissions issues scattered throughout the Windows registry, and myriad other annoyances. Then we got a phone call.

Our first approach in a situation like this is to attempt to repair the system. We will try every single surgical approach we can think of, and only when all other approaches are exhausted will we consider a full reinstall of the system. We prefer repair over reinstallation exactly because of companies like Sage. But, nothing we could come up with would work. Amusingly, there was no way to convince Windows to repair the permissions issues in its own registry, among other problems.

So we gathered up the client's software and we did a full reinstall of the base operating system, installed all of the ridiculous Windows updates, and then installed Act.

Or, tried to.

Act uses MS SQL 2008 as a dependency, but, apparently, it will not fix any problems with the MS SQL installation during the install process. There was a broken and incomplete installation of MS SQL 2008 on the system prior to the Act software install, so we first had to manually remove every trace of MS SQL 2008.

After the complete removal of MS SQL 2008, we tried again to install Act Premium 2012, only to be greeted with: "Sage ACT! has detected an ACT7 instance that could not be connected successfully. Either you have entered incorrect password or SQL service may not be running. The intallation cannot continue at this time. Please run the intaller again and provide a valid password or make sure that SQL(ACT7) instance is running and then continue installation."

To be clear, there were no SQL services installed. There were no ACT7 services (or ACT7 anything) installed. What in the heck is causing this silly thing to hang up on this?

It's at this point that I contact Sage for the first time. I'm on hold for over 15 minutes, and their annoying hold message keeps using the old standby lines, like, "Thanks for using Sage. We truly appreciate your business." (hah!), along with random sales pitches about how 3 million businesses use Sage, how they provide "practical and usable business solutions", and other minor annoyances.

To keep from grinding my teeth while on hold I start tracking down the source of the error myself and find a number of registry keys containing stale references to ACT7. I remove all of those, re-attempt the install, and get a little further, only to be greeted with, "Sage ACT! Pre-requisite Installer has detected that the ACT7 instance is either not running or disabled.System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: The system cannot find the file specified at..."

What a piece of crap.

Oh, look, there's a "Submit feedback" button. Yeah, I'll do that ... oh, haha, "Could not connect to the feedback site. The feedback cannot be submitted at this time."

My phone call finally connects and I'm informed that the 30 day support period for the software has already expired and that it will cost $99 to get help from Sage on this.

Just to be crystal clear here: this is a company that's producing software with a broken installation process and cryptic and useless error messages, and then charging their customers a hundred bucks to get help with that.

I hang up, work on the problem myself some more, and then finally give in to their extortion and call them back. The second time, I'm on hold for 25 minutes.

But, at last, I get connected to a real, live human being. Someone who can make this infernal pile of garbage software actually work! Great!

Unfortunately, there are communication problems with the technician. Aside from the usual language barrier, we have a recurring difficulty where I ask simple and direct questions, and the technician on the other end ignores the question and provides answers that don't make any sense. Here's a direct, verbatim piece of conversation:

Technician: "Please click on exit."

Me: "The program is not responding. Would you like me to force-quit it?"

Tech: "No, just click exit.

Me: "The program is still not responding. Would you like me to force-quit it?"

Tech: (uses the remote desktop software to hilite the exit button for me) "Just click here."

Me: (somewhat annoyed at this point) "I did click there. The ... program is not responding!"

Tech: "Is the program not responding?"

Me: (taking a breath, counting a couple of seconds) "Yes, the program is not responding. Would you like me to force-quit it?"

Tech: "OK, so what you need to do is open up the task manager --"

Me: "--and force quit it. Yeah, I figured. Thanks."

This is useless tech support. It's frustrating tech support. It's tech support that would make the most patient of people grind their teeth in annoyance. It's tech support that is completely unhelpful for non-technical computer users. Providing this kind of technical support to your customers is an insult to your customers -- especially after you have charged them for the technical support, and doubly so after you have charged them quite a lot of money for your broken software.

There were numerous other problems with the phone call, too, but the remote technician was eventually able to use some software available only to Sage technicians to get the software successfully installed. At this point, I had been on the phone for 90 minutes, and we still had more work to do: we had to get synchronization working again between the two computer systems in the office.

I tried explaining this to the technician, but the technician kept asking me, "how was the database configured?" I had no idea. I didn't set it up to begin with. The individual who did was out of town. For some reason, we couldn't proceed until I told the technician how the database was configured.

We started to argue, and the technician hung up on me.

I didn't bother to call back.

The following business day, Chris got on the phone with Sage and tried working with them further. He was at least able to figure out that when the technician was asking me how the database was configured, what the technician actually wanted to know was the location of the database files. That was a question I could've answered without any trouble.

Chris and I had done some further troubleshooting on our own and concluded that there were two courses of action available to us to get synchronization working again: either repair the master database which, for some reason, Act insisted on "upgrading" only to bomb out with a useless error every time, or we could start with a clean database and potentially push a synchronization up from the client system.

Unfortunately, we couldn't get a clean database to connect to the network socket it needs to listen on in order to accept synchronization requests from clients. Windows Firewall is completely disabled, other software has been disabled, we've checked the listening network sockets on the computer, there's no reason why it shouldn't just work.

But, not working seems to be a common theme with Act software.

After another 90 minutes on the phone and multiple attempts to get the support technician at Sage to understand what needed to be done, Chris finally gave up.

We're still working on this issue for our client. We will find some way to get this system working again.

However, our client is extremely unhappy with Sage, and we are going to be sure to warn all of our clients away from it in the future.

You don't want to place your business into a situation where your business relies on software and you can't get effective support for that software when you need it most. When choosing things like CRM software for your business, make sure it comes with good support, and make sure the company behind the software isn't going to ask for money before they're willing to provide support for their own product.

Sage is not a company you want to do business with, because you can't rely on them.

We'll update this post as we continue to work on this issue.

Update January 20, 2012: Shortly after forwarding this on to someone at Sage, we've been contacted by a specialist there named David. We have an appointment for the next business day, and hopefully we can finally get everything taken care of on this. We'll update this post again on Monday.

Update January 23, 2012: David called right on time on Monday. He had no trouble understanding the various issues our client was having. He was friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable. Getting everything straightened out required a bunch of fiddly little fixes — database updates, Windows firewall entirely disabled at first and then re-enabled with exceptions, removal of a duplicate Subscriber database, and lots more. He stayed on the line until we were able to confirm that synchronization was working correctly. If I had gotten the opportunity to work with someone like him to begin with, I never would have had to write this post and I would have mumbled only a little about paying $99 for the support. To Sage's credit, though, an email and this post is all it took to get a call from someone that could resolve our client's issues. Thank you, David.

- Rob.