Chronos Intros SOHO Organizer, Notes 8

This company does not offer any customer service / support. I bought the software and have been trying for two weeks to get a response from them with no luck. I have posted using their tech support system, sent emails and called the phone number - which they do not answer and has no voice mail, not that they would return the call.
Just be aware that if you buy the software and have a problem you are on your own.

I am using SOHO Notes 8 and it is way better than the previous versions.  Far less buggy.  What does annoy me though is the vapourware that is NoteLife.  There is no way Apple is delaying approval for a Notes app for over a month.

I have also been trying to contact Chronos for weeks.  I paid for an upgrade to Organizer Version 8 from Notes 7, which cost a bunch.  However, the applications crash constantly in Snow Leopard, and my tech support requests have gone unanswered for weeks.  Something is fishy.

Peter

For me it’s two weeks so far. Not a word from them. Couldn’t get any pre-sales support, either, so I took a chance and bought Soho Notes, even though I knew about the particular bug and knew the comapny’s reputation for having the horrible-to-non-existent customer support.

The bug I’m fighting is that when SOHO Notes has its services enabled, the contextual menus in Flex Builder go haywire. Because this bug keeps me from using SOHO Notes, I haven’t been able to test it for other bugs yet.

Keywords to help people find this thread: CHRONOS SUCKS, CHRONOSNET SUCKS, SOHO NOTES SUCKS

Three weeks and counting—still not a peep from Chronos. I have never seen a company this unresponsive, and I have been buying software and hardware for over 22 years.

Just heard back… they are 40 days behind in their replies, by their own omission:

Peter

Dear Chronos Customers,

We are writing this email to let you know the status of any open support ticket you may have. If you do not have an open support ticket then feel free to ignore this email. On October 22, 2009 we released SOHO Organizer and Notes version 8 and we feel this release is the best yet. However, some of you have run into various problems and some of you have questions about the new version. As with any major upgrade there’s usually a high influx of support and sales inquiries about the new product.

We want you to know that we have received every support ticket that has been submitted. We will be responding to every support ticket that we have received. We have been and will continue to work day and night to respond to each and every support ticket. Currently, we are roughly 40 days out in our responses. We feel being honest is always the best policy. We are really sorry we are so far behind.

So far we have found that the majority of support tickets fall under one of three categories: 1) General bugs; 2) Conversion issues; 3) How to type questions. Below is general advice we can provide for each of these categories while you wait for an individual response to your ticket:

———————
General Bugs
For a good portion of confirmed bugs we have already fixed them. The best thing you can do is download the latest version of SOHO Organizer and SOHO Notes from our website. Then delete the com.chronos.SOHONotes.plist and/or com.chronos.SOHOOrganizer.plist files from the following directory:

/Users/your-home-folder/Library/Preferences

Conversion Issues
We have found that the majority of conversion issues can be resolved by following the steps found on the Conversion Help webpage:

http://www.chronosnet.com/Support/conversion_help.html

How To’s
A lot of how to type questions can be answered easily by looking at the manual. To access the manual launch SOHO Organizer/Notes and choose Help > SOHO Organizer/Notes Help.
———————

If any of the above advice resolves your particular issue then we would kindly ask that you close the ticket. If it doesn’t help then leave your support ticket open and we will respond to it as soon as we can. We hope that by doing this we can get our response time back to under 24 hours where we usually have it at.

Thanks for your continued patience.

Chronos Team

P.S.  For the latest status on NoteLife feel free to visit our company blog at the following URL:

http://www.chronosnet.com/blog/index.html

A sign that somebody’s home at the company,  a promise of honesty, an apology—all are welcome. It concerns me that they took so long to come forth with all three.

The letter says they are “roughly 40 days out in our responses.” I don’t know if that means they are 40 days behind or that it will be another 40 days before they catch up. It also says their normal support response is 24 hours. So whatever “40 days out” means, they were evidently caught way off guard by the popularity of this release, the number of bugs, or both.  Everyone makes mistakes. But it seems to me they are continuing to make them—or not really being honest. Why would it take them three weeks or more to send all customers an email explaining an extraordinary backlog of support issues? Why can’t their one support engineer (see the blog) at the very least do a quick copy-paste into every support ticket so customers know there’s somebody at the steering wheel?

I continue to feel there’s something very amiss with the company. I wish them well and really do hope they can take their products across the finish line. I hope they can earn back the good will they have let dribble away—as I say, a quick web search shows that they have a very tarnished reputation. I mean it as constructive criticism when I say there is an air of low-end retail about their merchandising and support—a heavyhandedness in design and message, a strong whiff of empty promises and false concern for the customer.

I’ll come back here and compliment them if they make things right.

I was a long time customer of Chronos but with SOHO Organizer they lost their way.  The early versions were useless, but with the hype surrounding Version 8 I went back to them.  What a mistake.  It never worked properly and I couldn’t get any customer support.  As of 14th January I still haven’t received a reply to support requests posted in October and November.  I didn’t just complain, I sent a detailed breakdown of all the bugs I’d experienced, but no reply. My last regretful request on December 2nd was for a refund and I’ve just received this: -

“As you may have noticed, we’ve been slow in responding to support tickets the past few months. We’ve had some problems, and as of December 31, 2009, our main support engineer is no longer with the company. We’re now trying to get caught up on the large queue of tickets and need your help”

and they asked me to delete any duplicate tickets I’ve created.  So no reply for 6 weeks now except a desperate request for me to help them clear up their own mess.

It’s simply really; if you want to pay a lot of money for a product that probably won’t work and for which there is no customer support and no chance of a refund - then go ahead.