I’m having a problem with Avast. I had problems with the computer and I crash-out to fix the problem. Of course Avast went with it. I have a paid Avast program, Internet Security 5.0, and I called to re-install it. The female on the phone said “sure we can take control of your computer and take care of that for you”. I said to myself “What”? I just want the download from the E-mail just like the day I purchased it.
I called back today and was told kind of the same thing, but I asked if I could do it myself, by E-mail, like last time. He tried to convice me to take control, but I asked again about downloading it myself. He said OK and sent me an E-mail. I got it, but it didn’t make sense to me and I couldn’t figure it out.
I called back and got someone a little less likeable and he did everything but stand on his head to get me to agree to take control of my computer. I finally got firm and said “The day we purchsed it was no problem. We bought it, was told Thank You, was sent an E-mail with download instructions (I still have it printed out on paper by the way) and it was done in no time”. I just want to do it that way again. He still went on blah, blah, blah. I finally told him this is just wasting my time and thanks anyway.
Ok, well, you ran into iYogi. And dealt with them well, it sounds like ;D
I get that something went wrong with your pc, now Avast! is gone, and you want to re-install and reactivate it. So first you need the install file. Grab that here>>http://www.avast.com/en-us/internet-security, just click on the “get trial version” link, right below the green “Buy Now and Save” button.
Once you have that installed, you need your license key that came with the original purchase. If that is also gone due to the problems you had, you will need to have it resent, go here for that>>http://www.avast.com/en-us/resend-license-paid.php, you will need the email you originally had it sent to.
Not as simple as you might of hoped, but this should get you going again.
@ Countrified,
Life would have been a lot simpler for you and unfortunately
quite a few others if you had come here first.
All those of us that enjoy helping others can only hope that more people
realize that the best help and advice can be found on the support forum.
All you need to do is ask. Asking for help is what started me on here
way back in 2004. I’m still here and so are many others that have been around for a while.
We’ve also added quite a few new people willing to help and knowledgeable.
None of us work for Avast even though staff from Avast monitors and sometimes interacts
on this forum.
The fee those of us who volunteer here always appreciate is a “thank you” and nothing more.
Have a great day.
Well, it isn’t Avast! you where actually talking to. They were unwilling or unable to provide their own support, so they contracted out 3rd party support, much like many companies do nowadays. This company is iYogi.
Like most structures such support providers use, they offer support but at some point or another they are going to try and sell you their premium service (complete with a Premium price tag, well over $100). I don’t know the internals of the company, but I would bet they offer incentive to their phone operators for selling the premium, so you can get people who are very aggressive with the sales pitch.
You will see it mentioned in that thread, but if you do not care to look through it, Avast! has a person for lodging complaints against iYogi, you can reach him at riley (at) avast (dot) com.
It should be mentioned that before they started using iYogi, Avast! had no phone support at all. So the question to ask is…Is this better than what they had before (nothing).
I’ll have to check that iYogi thread when I get a chance. I actually thought that name was a joke when you first mentioned it, lol. It’s all brand new to me.
Luckily I already knew about this site from a year or two ago. Otherwise I might have been aggravated enough to leave Avast Anti-Virus, even though I have a paid version.
Sure enough, he offered me a $169 package for 1 year for some kind of “complete” protection (which I did not take). Now it makes more sense why he was asking me what state I lived in and started talking about all the nice things near my house. What’s funny is I always talk to them when there is any kind of pause or waiting time, but I don’t try to sell them anything, lol.
Well, I do not feel the need to. I can come here or other places online, I also have RL friends who are much more PC savvy than me, so I do not see at as a needed option, for myself. Having a knee-jerk bad reaction to a remote session? I can sympathize, for sure. I have a knee-jerk bad reaction to people sitting at my keyboard, let alone controlling my PC from the other side of the planet. ;D Remote sessions are not evil, though. They can be an excellent tool. The only problem lies with accountability. They are going to play with your registry and such. Always a volatile operation. And should they brick your PC, who do you turn to?
It would be amiss to think of iYogi as a scam service or such. They get plenty of happy customers, you will only see the unhappy results here, not many pop in and register just to say “I was happy with iyogi support”, they just carry on as usual.
The 2 problems I consistently see are 1:The aggressive upsell of their paid service…this is just part of the business model, a necessary evil, and 2: Their “scanner”. It seems to always produce “results that indicate possible virus or bad registry”. If they are scanning the registry, they will always get results. Show me a registry scanner that does not show things to remove. You wont because you can’t. And since you already have a security program installed, who knows what kind of false malware positives scanning will produce, a known and common side effect of scanning a PC with one security application while another is installed.
I wanted to clarify the process followed by iYogi and process for supporting Avast customers. Taking remote is a mandatory process for the techs so they can better diagnose the issue and provide appropriate solution to the customers. Looking at the initial post it seems the main issue was taking remote of the machine and not Hard Sales but to clarify further, iYogi currently services more than 800 Avast customers per day, (about 24K per month) and the problems reported about Hardsales are just handful and a strict action has always been taken against techs found to follow this practice.
I agree that the techs will offer customers a paid subscription of iYogi as a part of the business model, but this is 100% Opt in and the primary focus is always to resolve user issues not selling the subscription. iYogi has a very well defined scope of support for Avast Free and Paid Users and iYogi will always provide free support to users in case the issue in In-scope of support and offer iYogi subscription upfront if the issue is Out of scope of support.
Please feel free to reach out to me personally if you face any issues related to Hard Sell or if you are not satisfied with your interaction with iYogi Techs.
With all due respect, if a user has an issue with iyogi (which there are many) I would rather direct them to e-mail riley (at) avast (dot) com. Personally I wish avast would cut iyogi loose. Also, why should anyone pay for your questionable service when they could get help here on the forums for free?
I was wondering, for future reference, could you (or anyone else, for that matter) tell me or point me to where I could see what exactly the scope of support is, for Free or paid users?
