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Posted on February 18th, 2010 by David Bayon
Acronis customer support update
Since we put Acronis True Image Home 2010 on the A List last year, we’ve had a steadily increasing flow of comments and emails disagreeing with our decision. This is generally to be expected with such popular products – True Image has been on the A List for several versions now – but the volume of messages on this product far exceeds the norm.
The majority of the complaints stem from problems being met with a lack of support from Acronis. It was brought to our attention that many users deemed the single month of phone support to be inadequate, and many also told of frustrating experiences with the Acronis Live Chat service and forums.
We don’t take such complaints lightly, and we have been in lengthy discussions with Acronis with the aim of improving things for customers. Last week I spoke to Ed Benack, Chief Customer Officer at Acronis, and explained in detail the issues many of you have been having. He acknowledged there have been big problems, accepted things hadn’t gone as smoothly as any of us would have hoped, but did his best to assure me that lessons have been learned. He also sent me an official response, which I’ve reprinted in full below this post.
As well as the official statement, Benack added that the 30 day support is “industry standard” for a non-subscription product, and that despite this limit Acronis “will always provide unlimited support for customers who may experience any issue with their recovery process”.
For now we still believe True Image 2010 deserves its A List spot, but we’ve bought our own retail copy and will be anonymously trying out the various support options over the coming weeks. In the meantime, we’re keen to find out whether the below statement is representative of a real customer service improvement or not, so please let us know your continuing experiences.
Dear David,
I would like to deeply apologize to anyone who has experienced a delayed response from our Customer Support Team. Due to the high level of interest in our new products (Acronis Backup & Recovery 10, Acronis True Image Home 2010, Acronis True Image Home 2010 Netbook Edition, and Acronis Online Backup), we were not able to respond to email support inquiries within service levels.
We have taken numerous steps to address this issue and have added 55 additional Support Professionals between November and January. We expect to be back to our normal turnaround time for email support by the end of this month.
If customers have an urgent issue, I always recommend using our chat service which can be found at http://www.acronis.co.uk/support/ by clicking the “Start Here” button. We have also added a great deal of content to our Knowledgebase to enable customers to quickly find solutions. (Note: The serial number must be registered to access technical support. The customer can register by creating an account on the support page and adding their serial number to their account).
As far as technical issues are concerned, just over one percent of customers have reported technical problems with Acronis True Image Home 2010. While this is a very good number by industry standards, we know it is of little consolation to anyone who has had an issue. We aggressively update the product to address both technical and usability issues. Most known issues have been resolved in the updates since the product’s initial release. Customers can download the latest version of their product at any time, by logging into their account: https://www.acronis.co.uk/my/
Again, on behalf of Acronis, I apologize that the customer service experience has not met your expectations. We are firmly committed to providing best-in-class support and service and are doing everything possible to live up to this standard.
Ed Benack, Chief Customer Officer, Acronis
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26 Responses to “ Acronis customer support update ”
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February 18th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
By coincidence I called their support line today, and after some time and pressing of options got disconnected.
February 18th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Long familiarity with Henry (he was a client of mine back in the 90’s) obliges me to ask: did you ring them with CLI turned on?
…but seriously, I am finding these days that phone calls in the most general sense are declining in reliability. You may have a customer support issue with your phone co, not Acronis…!
February 19th, 2010 at 9:29 am
Hi Steve – yes to cli and no it was their system. I got dumped into a black hole. I still think it the best, but support…
February 19th, 2010 at 9:35 am
Why do we hear so little mention of Shadow Protect, which some people think is superior to Acronis TrueImage?
February 19th, 2010 at 11:52 am
John; probably because the people who bring it up don’t leave a URL in their recommendation.
February 19th, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Acronis’s support has been an issue for over 3 years. Ed Benack has done little to make it any better. Of course PC Pro will get better support than any regular customer.
February 20th, 2010 at 3:06 pm
I have used Shadow Protect for a cople of years and believe it to be far superior. Acronis support is legendarily bad. I take PC Pro reviews with a pinch of salt now.
February 23rd, 2010 at 4:09 pm
I have used Acronis for about 3+ years now and in the past it has saved my bacon on two or three ocassions.
I currently have Acronis True Image Home 2010, build 6053, but since moving from XP to Win 7 64 bit it will not process scheduled backups, I have to run them manually.
So I for one am pleased to hear about Shadow Protect and will be looking at it as a replacement.
February 25th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Not only has the support been naff, but even their upgrade pricing is a joke. I can usually buy a full retail pack from Amazon for a few quid more than their so called special upgrade price offers they seem to keep sending me. I have just stopped upgrading and looked at free alternatives like EASEUS Partition Master – which does not quite do everything that True Image does, but meets my needs.
February 26th, 2010 at 9:55 am
Its not just the poor/nonexistent support that’s the major issue its the appalling level of bugs and even non working parts of the program that lead to need support that for me the main issue. There are many “work rounds” the company have been sending out for some basic bugs, e.g. the security level of an image has to be changed to allow it to be mounted if created from the boot CD. This worked OK in the last version! If the program worked well support would be less an issue..
February 28th, 2010 at 8:34 pm
Despite constant disappointment, I keep coming back to Acronis. Currently evaluating a (paid-for) copy of Acronis Backup & Security 2010 – build: 13.0.17.343
So far only one major crash, which brought the computer down and required Safe Mode to rescue the system. Asked for tech support but, apart from FAQ saying it’s a known problem, no response.
Pretty good record compared to previous version which stopped working after two months and was never able to be resuscitated. I lost all the backed up data (Impossible to access “corrupt” .tib files without expensive third-party help and recovery tools). Interestingly, the corrupt files are all OK now I have bought the latest version…
Why stick with Acronis? Because somewhere hidden behind bad support and archives that can’t be read is a great product. Maybe one day the front-of-house will be as good as what goes on in the back room
March 1st, 2010 at 4:29 am
The tech support still sucks. Half of their responses are “I See”. Got No Hekp whatsover, just asked me to generate & email them some reports. Don’t bother to answer half the ?’s you ask. Very Poor…
March 6th, 2010 at 1:25 am
I have been using True Image for a few years now, but because of the problems with dvd and especially Blu-Ray drives, I just can’t use it any more. The tech support chat is rediculous, you can hear them thumbing through the manual pages and reading the database.
The drives want to pop the drawer open every time and unattended backups find the drawer open when you return. Won’t write to a D/L dvd, won’t write to a d/l blue-ray past 25gb. Then tehy ask me to buy the 2010 to get support on these problems . right . that’ll happen ….
Though earlier versions have been good to me and really work well to h/d media.
I’m going to miss it and will be searching for a similar product that does work and doesn’t ship out their tech support to India.
Remember when Peter Norton used to pick up the phone in his kitchen ……… I do.
March 17th, 2010 at 8:29 am
Well as the only real hope of suport customers have lost the Support Forums for the last day, 17/03/10, there is no information that I have found as to why. But the result is for most there is no support at all untill/if they are available again.
March 20th, 2010 at 9:55 am
The suport site has been back up for some time now. But alarmingly there was a post from another software firm who have been trying to get them to sort out a clash beteen there products and got nowhere so have moved back to the public suport site.
April 3rd, 2010 at 12:34 pm
It’s interesting to note that in his letter Ed Benack mentioned that only 1% of customers reported issues with their software. I only got one Windows 7 system and after putting Acronis TIH 2010 on it found that the Auto Consolidation feature did not work nor did the cleanup process. As I reckon that this is a standard install I must be really unlucky to be in the 1% – more like 100% of customers have very little chance of getting this to work.
April 8th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
I bought TrueImage Home 9 a couple of years back, and it NEVER worked. It was suppopsed to do an incremental backup every other day to an external drive, and generate a new full backup every 30 days (seemed like a sensible option). However, it never obeyed any of the rules for the back up destination, so old backups were not removed automatically. In the worst case scenario, you would think that it was happily backing up when in actual fact the external drive was full (potentially leaving you unprotected). Their support is a bad joke. I couldn’t believe, and still can’t believe, that PCPRO are defending their decision to award this piece of software an award. Seriously PCPRO – can I have a refund please??!
April 8th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Isn’t this the best reason ever to not use TI home: http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=37401
Is it still the case with the 2010 version?
Nightmare!
April 9th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
In my experience StorageCraft outperforms Acronis by far, the 2nd time I had an issue with a corrupt Acronis backup was just too much..
ShadowProtect has been ace so far.
April 12th, 2010 at 8:07 am
Oh dear. I used to trust PC Pro reviews…
May 25th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
Just installed TrueImage 2010 on my Win7 64bit and Win7 wouldnt restart normally! had to use safe mode to set back to a recovery point! Not impressed!
August 20th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Just posted on the help forum about this lot. Abominable user interface, incomprehensible instruction set (why no decision tree to enable a user to locate only the subset of functions that are currently needed???)
Appalling, just appalling.
August 20th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
“Again, on behalf of Acronis, I apologize that the customer service experience has not met your expectations. We are firmly committed to providing best-in-class support and service and are doing everything possible to live up to this standard.
Ed Benack, Chief Customer Officer, Acronis”
How often do we see this sort of insincere boilerplate response? All the time. They are very quick to take your money though.
b0ll0x to this company
August 20th, 2010 at 6:55 pm
More:
They delete civil forum posts (mine and at least one other user) which attempt to get a solution to problems with their software. This is one company to avoid like the plague.
August 22nd, 2010 at 9:08 pm
I am a very happy user of Acronis TI 10 Home but this latest incarnation True Image Home 2010 is a very poor piece of software. Installed on Sony AW11 XU/Q – took two attempts to install the software then locked one third way through image backup, several uninstalls and reinstalls with latest version from website did not solve problem – then computer crashed, went to safe mode and used restore to recover. I now consider this software more dangerous than a lethal virus. As found by other posters service was useless. PC Pro undermines every other A list recommendation by including this software. PC Pro should know that backup software MUST work reliabily every time it is used.
October 1st, 2010 at 6:29 am
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