I have been using, and recommending, Avast for more than a decade. A large part of that recommendation has been based on Alwil's adherence to ethical and straightforward business practices. I have become aware of a relatively recent change in that customer support has been contracted to an entity called "Bomgar," and this has NOT turned out to be a good move. I originally received a complaint from a single paid user whom I support, but after cursory inquiries of others have received complaints from over a dozen paid users, all of whom have the following comments: (1) they've had to wait as long as a half hour just to get a connection with a tech; (2) when connected, the first thing the tech does is try to strong-arm them into giving the tech access to their machine, on the premise that "there are so many problems and errors on your machine!" that have to be fixed BEFORE they can help them (these machines are quite clean, BTW...I maintain them), (3) they are then coerced (so far unsuccessfully...they end up hanging up on the tech and calling me) into having the tech "clean" and "update" their machine BEFORE fixing the issue the person was calling for in the first place. In each instance of my knowledge, the "problem" was simply not using the new license key file correctly. It had nothing to do with the user's system. Fifteen seconds of honest assistance would have solved the "issue." Instead, these folks were subjected to a high-pressure, low-brow sort of hard sell that is generally looked upon by IT professionals like myself as a step above outright fraud. Why did you engage this entity? Do you have any oversight of them? Do you understand the damage to your company's reputation it is generating?
