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Skype & Customer Service
Skype have seemingly fixed the bugs related to Skype 4 and the ASUS Xonar D2 card. Read more here. Thanks to Ivan for giving me the heads-up on this!
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to rectify a problem that I’ve encountered with the Skype 4 release, namely, it just doesn’t detect my sound card device. The device driver is installed properly, it’s a common sound card (ASUS Xonar D2), and there are no present driver conflicts on the system… yet Skype 4 only picks up the audio converter driver, but not the actual audio driver itself. The peculiarity is, of course, the Skype 3, 2 and 1 all pick up the device.
Presuming ths to be a bug of some description, or requiring some simple fix that I had yet to discover, I headed on over to the Skype website, about three weeks ago, and decided to send off a support request that said something along the lines of:
Hi, am having a problem with Skype 4, it won’t detect my sound card (but earlier versions of Skype do), any ideas? The card is an ASUS Xonar D2. Thanks in advance.
Simple, succinct, to the point.
Immediately following, I received the ‘mandatory’ auto-reponse, saying it would take them up to 48 hours to respond to queries, as they were under heavy load, and struggling to reply to all users’ queries within their normal 24 hour period. Fair enough.
Four days later, I got a reply:
Thank you for your understanding and patience. We advise that you upgrade to the latest Skype release.
You can check your Skype version in Skype->Help->About. Skype can be found here: http://www.skype.com/download/skype/windows/
The latest version includes up to date bug fixes and added features.
My enquiry was already about the latest version of their software… so I replied with a simple email stating that that was the case, and that previous versions worked with my sound card.
Fast forwarding a week, I got another reply:
If your USB device does not appear in the API (”Manage other programs”) access list, please check that:
- the USB port is working
- you have connected the phone to your PC
- you have installed the phone drivers correctlyIf the problem remains, please contact the device’s manufacturer as there might be a hardware problem with the device.
What USB device? Once again, an automated response, once again, nowhere near the mark. If all I’m getting is automated responses, why is it taking a week to respond?
By this point, I was getting a little terse:
This is nothing to do with a USB device, it’s to do with Skype v4 not detecting my sound card, even though it is correctly installed and Skype v3, v2, and v1 all have detected it before.
I’d appreciate an actual response, not canned responses based on keywords.
Thanks.
Finally, a response within 24 hours… will it be any use?
If your USB device does not appear in the API (”Manage other programs”) access list, please check that:
- the USB port is working
- you have connected the phone to your PC
- you have installed the phone drivers correctlyIf the problem remains, please contact the device’s manufacturer as there might be a hardware problem with the device.
Err… no.
The ‘conversation’ currently sits with this email, which I sent a week ago:
Sending me the same email as last time (which I said was way off-topic) does not help me at all.
This is really, really poor customer service.
I can’t believe how pathetic the customer service is. There’s no way to contact them directly, no significant contact details, no way to elevate your query and, seemingly, no way to get an actual human to respond to you. This is the epitome of abysmal customer service, and I really think they deserve to be named-and-shamed for this… it doesn’t cost anything to provide good customer service, in fact it’s a monetary benefit for the company involved. Not providing good customer service is nothing short of sheer laziness.
Rant over (for now). If anyone has any details for someone at Skype, I’d greatly appreciate if you could forward them to me…
Update: Received this this morning (27/02/2009)…
We are sorry to hear that you experience problems, however, it is good to hear that your problem is solved with an earlier version, we hope you continue to enjoy using Skype.
We deeply apologize for Skype 4.0, as some functions are still not working, however please check back to skype.com regulary for updates.
Not really the response I was looking for, but I guess it’s an improvement over telling me irrelevant things. Perhaps they shouldn’t have released Skype 4 if it didn’t work properly with one of the best-selling sound cards on the market?
Guess they don’t have the budget for actual customer support! That or their customer service consists of monkeys on typewriters.
yeah…I had the exact same experience with the exact same card, only mine went the other direction. Skype 4 worked fine for me, I bought a Xonar D2, and all of a sudden Skype loses all ability to make sounds…funny, because no other applications seemed even remotely confused by the sound card…At least now I know that if I revert to 3, I can skype again.
[...] me that Skype 4 has been updated to fix the problematic detection of the correct device (see my original post on the problem). I haven’t tried it out yet, and won’t get the chance until this evening, but Ivan [...]