While TurboTax may have a good product, and good customer service representatives, they don’t have good customer service.

Last fall I bought TurboTax for the first time. I had gone to the end of the line with extensions, and was filing in October. They offer a service whereby you can order the next year’s software in advance. I did so. The software never arrived.

In an on-line chat (for which I waited about 2 minutes, not the 2 hours advertised), I was told that if you sign up for automatic updates after October 1, you get the following year’s software. In other words, when they asked me to sign up for automatic updates while I was buying 2004 software, I was actually buying a 2006 update, not the 2005 software.

So then I buy the 2005 software. I go through the dialogs and click “buy” or whatever. The same screen returns. I don’t click “buy” again just our of caution, but there is no evidence, no e-mail, no nothing, that my order was received. From another tab, I looked up the order and it was in a pending status. I then spent 15 minutes on hold to get to the call center (India, I think) where I was very quickly provided the means to download the software.

So in each case, flaws in the software led to me using an expensive on-line resource. If the damn thing had worked reasonably in the first instance and correctly in the second, I would have saved 30 minutes of time and Intuit would have saved two, no doubt expensive, customer contacts. Addressing the symptom, not solving the problem.