Accepted payment for software but no license provided. No response to numerous emails. Please refer to email thread below to which I've received no reply:
I'm sorry if my initial request was unclear.
The enthusiasm of these testimonials is quite impressive. It's typical of marketing departments not to share any endorsements that profess anything less than 100% praise. This is why I almost never put any credence into what I read in the way of testimonials
Here's what I wrote on your FB page today. For some reason, it doesn't appear but I kept a copy of the post with the expectation it would be deleted and blocked.
FB POST ___________________________________________________
Scrivener followers number 42K and growing every day. The success of L&L in their development has been impressive. Listening to users has apparently contributed to this success.
But unlike almost all of the 42K users following on Facebook, I hope no one will be offended if I share my experience before L&L customer service deletes this post and blocks me from this FB page.
L&L dismissive attitude may be tied to the low price. This growth comes the disturbing cost of irresponsibility toward their promises. Hockey stick growth curbs happen when companies become too successful. I would not blame the CS team for their dismissive attitude. As with many web-based companies, providing a human voice in real-time via chat or voice is too expensive.
The CS managers and their board members forget that their success depends on their customers. As the owner of a small consulting first, I've never forgotten that my clients enable our team to be successful.
We would never make a customer wait days for a response to a sincere, specific and articulate inquiry. More importantly, we would carefully read a customer's email so that we can respond to each and every point. Not simply read the subject line, the cut and paste what the boss instructed them to day. Pick a response that most closely matches, paste that non-sequitur response, add a disingenuous phrase-- such as "we thank you and we're so glad that we could help you". Please let us know how else we can be of disservice.
The key point is that after a writer user has paid their nominal fee for the software. Buy it. It's less than a lunch for two. But the learning curve is high. Even when you hire a training specialist at ten times that price, you also have to consider if your learning curve investment will be worth it. I've found "time saving, long learning curve" software to be a sophisticated form of writer procrastination.
Many writers, in some fleeting moments, wrote our best work when putting away all of our notes cards and file folders. We centered ourselves with mindfulness technique of choice. We find our inner voice. We channel what we've read and remember. If we are skillful, were enter what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes in his work as the psychological concept of flow.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi
When such a useful product is priced so affordable, the what I call the "Comcast Effect". Comcast's customer service has prompted customers to take the time to vent on a number of web pages. Other than in public policy and political discourage on the web, there no wrath that a customer scorned by customer service. The term customer service has become an oxymoron in an Orwellian sense.
The slogan "We care!" is true for a CS departments. Unfortunately for the users, the care is directed toward L&L and not where it would be most useful.
In closing, my experience has been L&L suggests that future users watch out for low prices. Low-cost support is worth what you pay for it.
-- Rick
LitNLat
London,#2REBUTTAL Owner of company
Wed, September 21, 2016
This customer purchased a macOS licence from us by mistake, when he intended to purchase a Windows licence. He emailed us asking us to change the licence. We did so. We voided his macOS licence and sent him a 100% discount coupon for the Windows version so that he could use the Windows version instead.
The customer then emailed us back pointing out that we had not refunded the price difference (the macOS version being $5 more expensive than the Windows version). Our customer support person pointed out to the user that the only other way she could have swapped licences was by refunding the original licence so that he could re-purchase, but there's a processing fee for full refunds that would be more than the difference of the cost of the licences. (The processing fee is charged not by us but by the company that runs our store, eSellerate.) This was actually a mistake on our part: it's true that there is normally a processing fee for full refunds in most cases, but there should not have been one for a user just wanting to swap licences after an honest mistake during the purchase process.
On hearing this, the user wrote to us again, now asking to keep the Mac licence - but we had already voided that and provided him with the Windows licence that he had requested. Because of the confusion, this got passed up the chain, and we refunded double the difference between the licences (the extra to make up for the fact that we had got it wrong) so that he was left with a valid licence for the Windows version (the version he had wanted in the first place) at a lower price than normal.
It's not true that the user received no reply, nor that he has no licence. The user has a valid Windows licence (all he needs to do is go through the purchase process on our site, choose the regular Windows licence, enter the 100% discount coupon we sent him, and he will have a Windows licence without having to pay again), and he has received several replies from us over the past day or so.
So, at this point, the user has a valid Windows licence, and he got it for $12 less than the regular asking price, because of the 20% discount he had already used during the purchase process and the extra refund we gave to make up for the initial inconvenience. We have also told him that if he is still not happy and no longer wants the product, we will give him a full refund. (He can also take us up on this if he really doesn't want the Windows version and would rather get a refund on that and buy the macOS version again, but we have assumed this isn't what he desires given that it was a mistaken purchase the first time around.)
We do sincerely apologise for the mix-up in our first exchange with the customer, but this was already being resolved when he decided to write this "rip off" report and has since been resolved completely. Such mix-ups are very unusual and we are usually highly praised for our customer support. I regularly receive emails from users telling me how far Astrid (who was complained about here) and others have gone to help them.
For anyone reading this, I recommend taking a look at our forum (literatureandlatte.com/forum), website literatureandlatte.com) and social media pages on Facebook and Twitter to see that we enjoy a very good reputation and relationship with our customers. We most certainly have never ripped anybody off, and no one who has purchased from us has ever been left without a licence, including the complainant here. The vast majority of our users are, fortunately, very happy!