Avast pulls iYogi support over \'mis-selling\' claims

Anti-virus company Avast has stopped using iYogi phone support over claims the latter misbehaved within the way it tried to sell its paid-for service to customers.

In a press release published at the company blog, CEO Vince Steckler said that despite enjoying a healthy relationship with iYogi, with free phone support offered to its users for 2 years, it was suspending the deal; he said iYogi service representatives had misbehaved to extend sales of its premium support packages.

Steckler said Avast users received free phone support, and could be offered a chance to upgrade to iYogi's remote support service following the resolution of issues. However, Steckler claims that iYogi service representatives have attempted to extend sales of the premium service by falsely identifying non-existent issues on users' computers.

Steckler cited an editorial by security blogger Brian Krebs, wherein he said that the third-party firm "appears engineered to do little else but sell expensive and unnecessary support contracts".

Krebs said he called the support line listed on Avast's site, and an iYogi representative asked him for a phone number and an email address, and permission to achieve handheld remote control of his computer. “He directed me to take advantage of Internet Explorer to go to an internet site that requested permission to put in two ActiveX add-ons. Those add-ons installed a handheld remote control client called Bomgar Support,” he said.

“He asked if I had previously installed any anti-virus software, and that i said I wasn't sure (I hadn't). He then fired up the Windows Registry Editor (regedit), poked around some entries, after which unfolded the Windows System Configuration Utility (msconfig) and the Windows Event Viewer. He somberly read aloud the various entries within the event viewer marked with yellow exclamation points, saying they were signs that my computer can have an issue. He then converted to the ‘services' panel of the system-configuration tool and noted that the ‘manufacturer' listing next to Avast anti-virus read ‘unknown'.”

Krebs said the representative offered to unravel the problems if Krebs bought a support package, costing £108 and available for one- to a few-year terms, and told him that the issues would take per week to be corrected by Avast, but can be resolved immediately upon payment to iYogi.

This brought about Steckler's statement wherein he said: "The behaviour that Krebs describes is unacceptable. We had initial reports of this behaviour a number of weeks ago and met with iYogi's senior executives to make certain the behaviour was being corrected. Thus we were shocked to determine about Krebs' experience.

“As a consequence, we have now removed the iYogi support service from our website and soon it will likely be far from our products. We believe that the sort of service, when performed in an accurate manner, provides immense value to users. As such, over a higher weeks, we're going to work with iYogi to establish whether the service is usually re-launched.”

In a letter published on Krebs' blog, Larry Gordon, iYogi's president of worldwide channel sales, called the investigation "a Tylenol moment for iYogi and the leadership team".

Saying that the comments "provide iYogi with opportunity", Gordon added that making a market and meeting consumer demand for subscription-based services required an innovative marketing approach, so it followed a "serve to sell" model of free trial followed by the upselling of the paid-for service.

He said: “We market to consumers throughout the internet and partner with high-growth technology companies like Avast. While technology in some respects is becoming simpler and easier to make use of, every so often and for some people it has become more complex.

“Despite the hot turn of events, we believe that this model is an ideal complement for the main freemium anti-virus player and has enhanced their brand's engagement with this group of customers. This view is endorsed by the shopper satisfaction scores for Avast customers over the past nine months that show over 95 per cent of the respondents are satisfied, with an enormous majority being extremely satisfied (84 per cent). Four per cent aren't satisfied and we have to do a higher job with them, and can determine easy methods to fine-tune the agent sales process even further. The technical process has not been a query.”