I am refused a refund even when the purchased service was not what was not provided.

Question

I signed up to Office 365 in 2017. I also took up the offer for PDF X premium millennium.

I then had to upgrade my device and when I tried to reinstall PDF X premium millennium, I found out that I was asked to pay again even though Microsoft had already charged me for a year in advance.

On several occasions I tried to contact support but every time I had to give up because there were too many in the queue.

Finally, I dedicated a whole Sunday and after it was my turn, I was passed around different departments over seven hours of chat. During this period, I provided remote connections to my device on two occasions. On both occasions they failed to resolve the problem. I finally got a call from an engineer. I told him that my registration record must have been corrupted on the master server. He asked me to login at myaccount.microsoft.com which returned an error. He agreed with and told me that he will report it, and I will be sent an email when it was corrected.

I went to bed expecting to have an email regarding the case in the morning. To my surprise, there was a ruling that the software was already installed on another device. Whoever made such a ruling hadn't read the transcript or spoken to the engineer who phoned me. So, I connected and managed to chat to support again who obviously opened yet another case ID. I explained the problem and they sent me a chat transcript of the previous day. I told them that I didn't have time to chat, and this needed to be resolved through email, they confirmed the support email address.

I kept asking for the case to be escalated. Initially they didn't even respond to may emails. Until I threatened them with legal action and then they started to ask for remote connection again.

I am an IT professional with over 35 years of experience in the field. I started from coding on and then became network administrator, project manager and then a system analyst. Over the year I had to sit and pass several Microsoft exams including SQL Administrator and from my discussion with the Microsoft Engineer it was clear what the problem was.

I am sorry but these support staff treat everyone as a new user to Windows. They are junior staff with no experience or knowledge of the underlying processes. They can only deal with user side issues, if that.

I explained the problem again, but it turned out that they won't escalate a case outside their own department. They just tell you that they are not authorised to access anything outside of their own department or as they put it they don't have the tools to address the problem.

Then they stopped responding to my emails. I tried to join the Microsoft 365 business, but they won't go outside of their department either. I transferred my OneDrive data and removed my primary email address that no longer had a valid record in the master server and transferred it to Microsoft 365 Business. I am paying two places for even less service that I bought into in 2017 and no one seems to think that is a problem.

By then I had managed to get in touch with PDF X who finally agreed to cancel my membership with nine months left and I assume they refunded Microsoft. But Microsoft refused to cancel my MS365 Personal account, even though I said, I will chase the refund later. But again, the answer was: Sorry, I don't have the tools to help you, and I can't escalate it outside of the department. Then just to prove that this guy didn't know what he was doing, I asked for a transcript of the telephone call that I had just consented to, anticipating this situation.

This guy refused on the basis that I was going to use it as evidence against him. This is out of immaturity rather than malice. He didn't even email me the case ID. This proves how childish these people are. I don't want to spend time going to arbitration or the courts. I just want to get on with my work that has suffered a lot because of all of this. My time is far more valuable to chase after $120. My fee is around €1000 a day.

This is why I tried everything. I gave them suggestions and tried to compromise but these people don't even seem to have common sense.

So, I am preparing to go to ADR and I am going to ask for compensation for the time I spent which includes far more 7 hours of chat full of apology and nothing else unless someone shows me a way to talk to someone sensible.