Adobe Publicly Apologizes About its Customer Service

Publicly acknowledging a recent spate of complaints about tech support and customer service, Adobe wrote all of us an “I’m sorry, I’ll do better” letter and slipped it under our door this morning, figuratively speaking. They posted it as a PDF halfway down their main support page. You can go there, or just click here to download it (PDF, 124K).

Titled “Open Letter to Adobe Customers,” Adobe’s director of Technical Services, Lambert Walsh, apologized to the company’s end users for “a level of service that is inconsistent with what [our customers] expect and deserve.” He explained that a transition to a new “global service provider” didn’t go as smoothly as they had planned and are taking immediate action to rectify problems.

In the meantime, he says if you can’t get what you need from your local Adobe customer service people, you can escalate unresolved issues by sending an e-mail to ad******@***be.com.

To me, this is another example of why I so admire the Adobe ethos. They’re not a faceless corporation — you can see the quality people behind everything they do. After I read the letter, I believe Lambert Walsh really is somewhat mortified at what’s been going on with his department, and his public pledge to fix it ensures the issues will be fixed, because now everyone’s watching.

I do have one niggling complaint. The PDF was created with Microsoft Word, not InDesign. What gives? :-)