Wow, I thought I had seen lousy customer service, but Nuance is taking the cake. I have tried to contact the audio mining software company for the last two weeks, through their Enterprise sales web site (no response to my email), and on the phone to about 4 different phone numbers (no response to my voice messages). Tuesday the 7th I spent about 3 hours on hold waiting for their Enterprise sales departments (including multiple calls where I’d been hung up on while on hold, and voice messages on this line asking them to contact me), after trying other departments and complaining. Their other departments, however, don’t even know that the product I’m interested in exists. They did try to contact the Enterprise sales department themselves, however, but even customer service couldn’t get through! The hold “music” ironically talks about how customers go online to complain about poor customer service, and how their products can help you keyword search those web sites. And their website tag line: “As a speech company, we put a premium on listening – get in touch with Nuance today!” Uh, no you don’t.
I finally got ahold of someone in the Enterprise sales Thursday the 9th after a similar hold experience and at least 30 minutes on hold that time. Claudia told me they needed to know my budget, which I didn’t actually know. She said they wouldn’t call us back if we didn’t have at least 5-10K. I told her sure, then we’d have that if that’s what we needed. She took my name, phone number, and email, as well as Mark’s. Now, another week later, no response.
I’ve been hung up on 3 times this morning. I tried the customer service department again, and now I’m on hold while they try to contact the Enterprise sales people for me. The hold music has switched back from the stuff that customer service plays to that of the Enterprise line, so I’m suspecting customer service is not getting back to me, either. (One hour later, no response). By the way, Nuance, this does not bode well for our confidence in your technical support or customer service in general.
So, I’m putting it out to the web: if anyone has an audio mining software solution to search several camera audio feeds for keywords (basically something that competes with Nuance’s Dragon Audio Mining SDK), please contact us through this blog. Let’s talk. It’s more than your competition is willing to do.
[Specifically, we need something speaker-independent and that processes files automatically].
Update: Even worse, I just got a phone message from Nuance saying, “We recently received an email from Mr. Stofer regarding Dragon and wanted to make sure we followed up.” Uh, first of all, there has been no email to their company in the last six weeks, nor am I “Mr.” Stofer …
Nuance, you’re terrible. I am so glad we’re not working with you.
The customer service you mentioned is ridiculous. For someone who takes pride in providing excellent service, they are not doing a very good job. They should have a more direct way of contact rather than making you jump from department to department just to be able to talk to someone. We know about good customer service so we know it’s important to put the customer’s best interest first.
Hi Katie, I am also having a hard time trying to get ahold of someone at Nuance about the same product. Sounds like you found an alternative to their data mining SDK. If so, would you mind sharing what that is?
Actually, no luck yet in finding a replacement, but we’re starting to explore using Google Voice as a possibility. We’re working with a firm from Atlanta, MediaMacros, who will do the ultimate programming for us.
What are you interested in doing with speech recognition?
I ran the Nuance PaperPort Professional and PDF Converter Professional on Hewlett Packard DV7. When ever I started to use the software the computer would start to act up and would routinely require to be rebooted. After a couple of years of this, the hard drive crashed. So, I bought another computer and loaded up all the software except Nuance – call me paranoid but I just had a feeling. The computer has been running great for months – but I need to edit some documents and print to pdf, so I loaded Nuance onto the new computer – has been freezing up ever since. Paranoid? Coincidence?
I have given up on Nuance. I registered, and after confirming via their email, I an unable to login. The message is that my account has been disabled. I will be using Windows 8 Pro Speech recognition instead. While it is not quite as accurate, at least I don’t have the stress level when I need tech support. I have never, in 25 years on the ‘Net, encountered worse (non) service.
Awesome. I justo googled “nuance worst customer response” and i found your post.
It’s awesome, i’m CTO of a small company, we got a SaaS product which uses TTS and ASR from Nuance in the backend,
We have bought so far over 20 licenses from nuance in a small period of time.
Well, all i need is to add support for some extra languages.
Two months later, after talking to several people located in Spain, Canada ad Argentina…i just CANT buy this feature.
The company sells it, but i can’t find anyone in nuance who can sell it…wondering what makes my money bad money…
Just stumbled across this post while researching a solution for the company I work for. I’m curious if you ever found a suitable product to meet your needs?