intuit still sucks

another day, another reason to be irritated with intuit.

i’ve documented my beefs with intuit, the makers of quicken and, i now remember, turbo tax, all over this site. here and here and here and here, to be specific. but i just must beat this dead horse one more time.

today i filed my income tax using turbo tax online, the fine fine intuit product. which, i must admit, is easy to use and well-designed. my company now provides electronic w-2 forms, which can be imported into turbo tax online. so i didn’t have to retype my w-2 numbers, and you can now choose which questions to step through instead of being forced to answer every question about whether you purchased farm equipment this year and such, so the process was even more quick and painless and comprehensive than it was before.

but of course, it being intuit, all could not go smoothly. there’s a link for fidelity customers, of which i am one, to follow to the turbo tax online site and, if you follow it, you get 50% off the filing fees.

so i followed the link. and i stepped through the series of pages filing my return, each of which had an enormously long url in the address bar that contained “fidelitydisc=” or something like that, so i assumed that i was going to get my discount.

which of course, after finishing and filing my electronic return, i did not. i was going to just let it go, but after i spent time straightening out my cingular wireless phone bill to the tune of $80 or so, kirk guilted me into getting my $20 back from intuit.

fine.

so step one i went to the turbo tax website to initiate an online chat session with their help desk. after trying in safari, firefox and even explorer, i finally figured out that their chat client is apparently not mac compatible.

aaargh and grrrr. but fine. i’ll call the number.

no hold time, which is good on a saturday afternoon. no hold time because, naturally, their call center is in india.

now i am as liberal as they come. and living in new york, you can hardly afford to be too ethnocentric. but there is, i must admit, a small part of me that gets really irritated when companies send these jobs overseas. now i live in new york and can therefore understand any accent. unlike some people i can understand the indian operators just fine, but the indian operators cannot understand me. and that irritates me too.

i say operators because it took two calls to intuit to get my discounted price. that’s how i’m sure the call center was in india–both operators had indian accents. one could be a coincidence, but two within 30 minutes confirms it. anyway, i dialed the number buried on the intuit site, and the first operator was useless. just repeatedly told me without explanation that i had to wait 48 hours and call back.

so i went online to view the charge, and another phone number was listed as a contact. so i called that number, got another indian operator who was at least more helpful but who understood me even less than the first one. i mean, how many times do i have to respell “fidelity.com”?–f as in frank; i as in, well, in; d as in…well, you get the idea.

and she eventually gave me my refund and was helpful in that “i’m overtrained and reading from my screens” kind of way. but she all the time kept insisting that it was my fault for not following the link properly, and she kept telling me in that grandmotherly kind of way to “make sure i followed the link next year.” in the interest of keeping my newly-given discount i ignored her, but the third time she said it was too much.

so i let her know that i did, and that the url had the discount code, and that it was a problem with the site, and could she report that problem to the proper authorities?

she ignored me. and then exhorted me, one last time, to make sure to follow that link next year.

now, i must admit that my problem was eventually resolved to my satisfaction, assuming that actually do get my discount refunded to my credit card. but, first of all, it took two phone calls. and, second of all, the damn site should have worked correctly in the first place. and third of all, i should not have to be so persistent to get my frigging refund.

and, fourth of all, and i can’t believe i’m saying this, hire some damn americans to fuck up my order. they wouldn’t do any better of a job, of course. but at least their incompetence and intransigence would contribute positively to our domestic economy.

intuit. geez. they do one thing right as a company. which is they tie up your financial information so that, once you start using their products, you have no choice but to keep using their products even though you just know that they will eventually let you down and piss you off.

why do i use turbo tax year after year? because i started out using it years ago, and it’s more easy to click that “transfer your info from last year” button than to start from scratch elsewhere.

same reason i keep using quicken. the program that mistook the phrase “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” for a raison d’etre.

that’s all. i feel better now.

7 thoughts on “intuit still sucks

  1. Homestead.com uses fking intuit mail and I hate it! homestead mail sucks!

  2. I have the Quickbooks 2009…had to call customer service to get the software registered…was on the call for 1 hour and 31 minutes…over an hour on hold because I refuse to give a credit card number for the so called service plan…I asked the non English speaking rep to transfer me to a supervisor…she refused…out right refused…thank god there are other programs out there that do what Quickbooks does…you are completely correct….Intuit SUCKS…

  3. I sell, install, and support quickbooks. Nobody hates them more than I do. Their products are crap, they never work right even when you install them on a new computer that has been tuned by me so it screams and runs the best it can. I have done this over, and over, and over. I loathe their tech support even if it’s free. They are all in India and I hate talking to the dots.

    The poorly written program and the cost of support isn’t the only problems. Have you ever used Intuit Payment Solutions? Don’t go there. They will stick it so far up your rear end you’ll have a lump in your throat! And they won’t even give you a courtesty reach around.

    Ever use the built in emailing service? What percentage of your emailed estimates and invoices were lost in space? I’m averaging about 50 to 60%!

    Peachtree is a better program. It’s not perfect by any means but it doesn’t make me want to kill people like Intuit does.

  4. I’ve been an unthrilled user for many years now – through 3 upgrades. But enough’s enough. I just spent weeks with my bookkeeper trying to figure out why our online banking system got all screwy after working fine for years. It turns out that the intuit Community “experts” are saying we have to upgrade to version 2001 (I’m using 2008).

    I can almost understand it if they warned me in advance that support for online banking would come to an end in 60 days, but not only did they not warn, but they provided absolutely no explanations that I or my bookkeeper could easily find. Hours and hours wasted!!!!

    Rant all you want but nothing will change until consumers have viable options to turn to. WE NEED ALTERNATIVES!!!! — I’m looking at GNUCash, Simply Accounting, Microsoft Money and others. All recommendations highly welcome for posting here.

  5. Wow, I hate Intuit!! I went searching for a place to tell the world how much I hate Intuit, this will have to do. I have hated intuit for over 2 years now but it has reached a point that I just can’t stand it anymore. It’s really just the company I hate not the product. I really like the product they offer, it is very robust and customize-able but with that comes it is very complicated and confusing. So, with that said, one would expect top notch customer support, BUT WAIT! This is where intuit falls off the face of the earth, “hello is anyone down there?” If there is someone down there I guarantee you they are from India and can’t really understand what you are trying to tell them. They might know the words you are speaking to them but they don’t truly understand them. This situation makes for a real nightmare for the customer on the other end of the phone who just wants to fix the issue at hand and move on. Not to mention it’s hard to understand them as well. It takes me on average 6 minutes just to navigate the stupid call prompts before I am put on hold for another 45 minutes just to reach someone who doesn’t really understand me. If you want my advise intuit, fix your customer service. Your customer service is by far, the absolute worst. What I am trying to say is, even Verizon’s terrible customer service comes no where even remotely close to being as horrendous as your customer service, it’s down right insulting!! I could really go on for days and be very specific but I am not going to waist anymore of my time. Intuit, YOU SUCK! I HATE YOU!

  6. where can I complain vigorously to Intuit? I will explode if I cannot express to them how much they have ruined my world.
    Thanks,
    E.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.