AVAST! --- Good software, terrible customer "support"

“AVAST! --- Good software, terrible customer "support" ”

Written on: 01/07/2012 by Kalyenkov

My experience is that AVAST's software is good, but their customer service is aimed at selling upgrades in dishonest ways.
I used the free version of AVAST!for over a year and it was generally effective, but I did get a virus that required going to a local tech for fixing. So I went to a paid upgrade.
When I had a problem I didn't understand and called customer service for help. The representative examined my computer over the net and showed me a file where many sites I'd visited were listed, ann told me there were too many entries there. (I'm sorry, I'm far from being a geek, I don't know the name of the file now.) He advised me to buy a higher-priced package that would get reduce the number of entries. Before deciding, I phoned my local tech, and he told me that the number of entries in that file means nothing other than that I've gone to a lot of sites, and doesn't effect my computer's operation. So I passed on the second upgrade.
This year when I got the notice that AVAST would expire soon I thought about it but decided to renew again. (In fact I renewed it twice -- the confirmation of payment they sent me vanished almost immediately and I couldn't find it where it should have been in my downloads, so I ent back to the renewal age and ended up sending a second renewal -- $49.99 instead of $24.99. After I paid the notices to renew kept appearing, but that had happened before so I assumed my service would be renewed. When the $49.99 charge showed up in my bank records, it was to
NEXWAY DIGITAL PRODUCT, but I was still surprised when my AVAST! coverage actually terminated. I called their customer service and told them the situation, including that Nexway had apparently taken their payment and was told that my communication with my bank must have been pirated and I should buy a $200/year package from them so it didn't happen again. The representative looked at the processes runnning in my computer and showed me one called CRSS.EXE; unlike the other processes that were marked OWNR, it was marked FOREIGN, and assured me it was a serious problem. I looked CESS.EXE up on the net -- without ordering the $200 system! -- and found it can sometimes be used by a virus but is also a standard process. And when I looked in my processe again, without the AVAST representative being hooked in to my computer, it no longer had that ominous FOREIGN label.
This was at night, when Nexway's phone wasn't being answered; but when I later talked with Nexway, they said they were now customer service for AVAST and found my payment -- which they refunded at my request.