In previous jobs, I needed to have more contact with Microsoft than I do now and it was an extremely painful process, but we are talking quite some time ago. Have they improved? Well, based on the experience I had today, they haven’t much.
What Happened
I updated Office for Mac from 16.41 to 16.42. When opening Outlook a prompt appeared to switch to the “New Outlook”, I thought cool, that sounds great until then it told me none of my POP3 accounts would be compatible. What? POP3 accounts not compatible in an email program? Is Microsoft out of their minds?
So, I hit cancel and tried to search for information on their website. I searched, and searched, and searched. Nothing could be found. Eventually, I decided to contact Live Chat.
Live Chat Experience
Firstly, Live Chat is not compatible with Firefox so I had to switch to Chrome. It’s most likely Firefox’s security protocols.
I asked the question of the technician and had not heard of the issue, they wanted to troubleshoot my computer. So, they did remote access despite my better judgement. Finally, towards the end, they told me POP3 wasn’t supported in “New Outlook” as yet.
Summary
Starting the chat was painful, that almost took 10 minutes in itself. My query was picked up within 2 minutes but had to go through the account verification process.
The technician didn’t seem to know that POP3 wasn’t supported in the initial 25 minutes of the chat and had to waste my time fiddling with my computer and going back/forth with non-sense. It was a painful process but got the answer eventually which really could have been answered within 2 minutes.
I tweeted my experience and pleased that the product manager from the Outlook for Mac team picked that up, so at least I know my feedback went to the right person. Sometimes social media does work out better than contacting support.