Through her piano studio my wife purchased an educational license for Sibelius 5 several years ago. As a beginning cellist I have made use of one of the two active licenses her purchase included. I’ve reformatted Suzuki pieces to better see the repeated patterns and created sheet music of tunes I wanted to learn. I am by no means a Sibelius expert but I enjoy having a music notation tool at hand.
Recently I needed to reformat my computer’s hard drive and re-install the operating system and all the applications. Prior to doing this I tried to de-register the copy of Sibelius I had on my computer unsuccessfully. Every time I tried I got an error message saying the Sibelius server could not be reached. This morning I tried to install a fresh copy of Sibelius on my computer only to have it not work. The application installed and when started asked for the serial number but then said “your serial number appears to be corrupted”. The message also said to contact Sibelius support.
Some support calls are better than others. Some support calls are supremely frustrating. This support call was fantastic.
After navigating the usual maze of options I ended up talking to a representative called Larry. Larry listened to my situation and asked if I was using Max OS X 10.7, or Lion. When I said yes he said we could fix my situation in about 5 minutes.
First he had me create a Sibelius Software directory in the /Library/Application Support directory. Once the new Sibelius Software directory was in place he had me adjust its access permissions. This addressed the “corrupt serial number” issue. Next he walked me through the phone registration process to record the Sibelius generated computer number for my laptop with the serial number for our copy of the application. He also took care of removing the license registration for the previous incantation of my laptop - the one that disappeared when I formatted the hard drive. He then politely pointed out that the CD version of Sibelius would not be stable on Lion and strongly suggested that I download the latest version our license entitles us to own, version 5.4. With Sibelius 5.4 downloaded and installed everything is working perfectly again.
The call was over in about 5 minutes. Larry was responsive, helpful, and knowledgeable.
The icing on the cake however, was the follow-up email. Not only does it give me a case number and the option to contact Avid (Sibelius) for more help, it very succinctly and completely recapped the support call I’d just had. Complete with links to articles in their knowledge database for the two steps we’d taken to get me working again. Outstanding. In just a few minutes I went from being frustrated by a dialog message that said to call support to being completely satisfied and then astonished at the level of support.
Avid (Sibelius) has got customer support nailed.