Samsung SCM files and Support

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Another adventure in corporate support … Bad web forms, and the secret SCM export format and editing utility.

The E-Mail form on Samsungs support website is a hassle. I have to select my product in three(!) tiny(!) list boxes, where the third even has a pagination (wtf?). If you have to add pagination to a list, god, please, notice the wrong and invest some time to fix it. This is awful in terms of usability and user interface. (And of course if you get through that you will have to select yet (at least) two other categories before being able to “submit an email”.)

The best part yet though is that my product was not listed in it. Well … What do you do?

I found no way to give feedback about their website – or anything at all. There is only support I guess. So how would you report website bugs?

I chose Live Chat. I think this has been the second time I used a corporate live chat support. It works quite well, and was very helpful this time again as well.

They took my feedback – and I have no idea where they put them and what will happen to them. Well, at least someone listened to them now. 🙂

As for my actual issues: On my Samsung TV I can export the channel list, which exports an SCM file. This is a zip compressed archive which contains several files.

Samsung being a corporate as it is does not provide any specification or information on the format. No way to allow anyone to create tools to manage your channel list on your PC other other device, so you do not have to hassle through the TV and remote user interface to sort, order, categorize and otherwise manage your channel list(s). And they themselves do not provide a tool either. Or do they?

Surprise! They do! They do not publish information on this on their website, but they do send you an official program via E-Mail once you ask for it – after you get to know about it.

Wow, what a fucked up strategy – which it probably is not. Rather, it is probably that nobody has time or focus on this issue. Let the customer hassle through his setup – because in the end it works that way.

If you are looking for a tool to edit your channel list:

Samsung could gain a lot by publishing a specification of their channel list / settings format – which they have to have internally anyway – and by officially and publicly providing a PC utility to edit the exported data. Sad that they did not do so yet. Hopefully my feedback pushed them a little bit towards doing so – its in their interest after all. And maybe you will ask them to too?