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Annual Customer Support Rankings
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo's Tech Tuesday is running PC Mag's annual survey of best and worst PC vendors' customer support. At the top of the list: Apple. At the bottom: Sony. Heard any good tech support horror stories lately?"
Being on the phone with Dell tech support is by far the worst experience ever. They don't have a clue, and it sounds as if they are reading off solutions to a list of problems that sound like the one you might be having. Hopefully they move the damn thing out of India.
I'll never buy another monitor from them again.
Had a 21" monitor go bad, so I called Sony to get a repair. They said the warranty was 3 years, and the back of the monitor says "Mfg. August 2001" (this was mid-March 2004). So I should be set, yes?
No. That would be easy.
Apparently, Sony's system says that monitor was manufactured in February 2001 and thus is out of warranty. The only way I could prove the age of the monitor was to send in the original paperwork when we purchased it. Knowing my purchasing department, it's hidden in a box somewhere and it would be worth more to buy a new montior than spend the time looking for the paperwork.
Lousy jerks wouldn't even accept a picture of the back of the monitor clearly showing the serial number and manufacture date.
Here are the tables of results for notebooks and desktops
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Our company purchased a nice supply of Sony Microvault USB keychain drives. For whatever reason, these drives just stop working. If you unplug a drive without properly dismounting it, it will fail to be recognized under any OS as a drive. Windows reports it as a "security device". There is no way to recover the data, the drive is shot. Further testing showed that even if you dismount it properly, there's a good chance of corrupting the drive.
Call up Sony tech support, you'll get bounced around to several support numbers (some long distance, some toll free). Most of the time you get directed back to the number you previously dialed, and your issue is never resolved.
This is a documented problem, and on the occasion that you're able to get the correct tech support staff Sony will refuse to fix it. There is a lengthy process to fix the drive, but it's a pain and your data is unrecoverable. Sony has since stopped making the Microvaults, but it's a good example of how bad their support really is.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Apple's Phone support for consumer products is OK. They have their scripts they have to follow and having supported 150 laptops in a corp. environment I had to wrestle with them on more than one occasion trying to convince the schmo on the other end that I could NOT click on the such-and-such because my LCD really WAS dead. . . That said, their Xserve support is outstanding. I have owned 2 Xserves and an Xserve RAID and have gotten more than my money's worth with the AppleCare contracts from those high-end boxes. The techs TRUST you have done your due dilligence, that you are not a moron and know what they are talking about. They are not outsourced script-reading tech-support-monkeys and am I truly indebted to them for assistance on several occasions. It's nice to have "peers" answer the calls who know and use your same products, who understand you have a SERVER which can't just be restarted randomly in the middle of the day willy-nilly and actually resolve your issues post-haste. Thanks Apple.
My dad, who has a full service contract on his latitude D800 laptop (i.e. they come to his workplace to fix it) was asked to take his laptop apart and pull the modem adapter out, and try to place it back in when it would fail to connect. When he told them he didn't have the screwdriver (nor the expertise) to do any of that, he was told to go buy an appropriate screwdriver, and call them back so they would guide him.
Needless to say, I told him to call back, b1tch and complain and actually send a guy in to fix his laptop as per the service contract.
Turns out it was windoze XP that was screwing up. Now what would've happened if he'd fried his laptop with static electricity while trying to do the operation? Would they've fixed it? Provided him with a replacement, AND a backup of ALL his work-related data?
The response may have not been exactly helpful, but it was correct...
The great thing abotu Backup is that it just dumps files right onto the CD or DVD! If you mount it you can see the files right there and copy them to your hearts content. At least, I was able to get stuff off them that way.
That's what they meant I think, in that they don't "compress" the file in some wierd way like OTHER backup programs. They make sure you can get to the data without the program.
iPhoto is simialr in that underneath, it's just storing your original photos in directories, so if iPhoto ever stopped working or you had backed up an iPhoto library to disc you can just get out the JPG files.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The only time that I call those places is when I need to have a part replaced. And it usually sucks - you have to convince those on the other end of the line that you really do, in fact, know what you're doing and that you really do believe that the problem will be resolved by replacing the dead hard drive.P? I once had a fairly new Dell Dimension die. After looking at it I just reinstalled the OS on a new hard drive - problem solved. I called tech support to replace the hard drive and told them that was the problem. They started asking if I'd jumped through their hoops - I just said that the machine is working perfectly one a spare drive and that was the problem. I got the new hard drive.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.