UPDATE: After posting this I received an email from a higher-level support person. He promised me he would “look into” the “support” I received and asked me to send a log showing exactly what was happening. I’ll update as things move along.

Here at Gear Diary we love to publicize GREAT customer service. At the same time we also like to share stories of limited or poor customer service with the hope that it will encourage an improvement.

Here is my latest story…

I used Vlingo on my BlackBerry Bold 9000, and while I preferred the Beta version of Dragon I was also using, Vlingo came in handy on occasion. I updated my hardware to the Bold 9700 and discovered that neither Vlingo nor Dragon would work on it. I emailed Vlingo asking when the 9700 would be supported and heard nothing back. When I Tweeted the question publicly however I got a response. Well, actually, I got no answer at all … until some time later when this arrived.

COOL! Version 4.0 of Vlingo was out, and the Bold 9700 was supported.

I loaded it. The setup went smoothly. I restarted my Bold 9700. I went to use Vlingo and … my Bold crashed.

I restarted my Bold. I went to use Vlingo and … it crashed my Bold.

This happened three more times. I was getting frustrated. I removed Vlingo 4.0, restarted my Bold, reloaded Vlingo 4.0, went through the setup process and went to use the app. I started Vlingo and … it CRASHED my Bold.

So I Tweeted this:

Within minutes I heard back from Vlingo.

Okay, no problem. When I got home, I went to the Vlingo site and filled out a support request. Easy enough.

Once again, I heard back rather quickly. Only problem was that it was a form email, and it didn’t help one bit. It told me that Vlingo 4 was out (I knew that), that it supported OS 5.0 and that the Bold 9700 was one of the supported devices.

What it DID NOT TELL ME was what I should do, since the app is consistently crashing my Bold, and therefore completely and totally useless. It doesn’t work. It crashes my device. And that was why I tweeted in the first place, and why THEY told me to reach out to customer service, and why I wrote them as they had said to do.

Seriously companies- if you are going to offer customer support and encourage customers with issues to use the service, how about actually READING the complaint and responding to it … please? A form letter showing that you didn’t actually read about my issue just makes me not want to deal with you; and your app, even less.