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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?"
Apple is at the top, but not perfect.
:/
When the hard drive in my iBook died, I had to send it back to Apple (no problem there). As the documentation requested, I included my power adapter and the cord for it with the laptop back.
*repairs*
When my laptop was returned, not only did I not get my same power cord back, but the two pieces (the brick and the cord) we incompatible... Not only that, but I still had the small plug to go directly into the wall (I forget what they referred to it as), and that wasn't compatible with the brick piece either. WTF?
So I had to call them back up and have them send me a power cord and the small plug piece. They were quick and fairly understanding about it, but I'm yet to figure out why it would have been so hard to just send the same cord/brick piece back with it that I sent in...
But the laptop itself was repaired without issue and in a timely manner, it was just a minor inconvenience of not being able to plug in my laptop to charge it...
Based entirely on my own experiences and those of my friends (how's that for sample size?) I'd bet that for every call the manufacturer receives some poor "computer geek" friend gets ten calls.
It'd be interesting to know how the unofficial support channels stack up against the real thing. I'd bet that neighborhood support would put everyone to shame: we do everything from replacing hardware faster than any mail-in service does to trouble-shoot VPN setups for our bosses and we don't (usually) fall back on the old tech support dismissal "That's a software problem: call Microsoft. Good-bye." Or in the case of a hardware issue "That's a hardware problem: Call IBM. Good-bye."
The last time I needed to call IBM (to get the recovery cds for my laptop, they don't ship with them anymore...) I was quite surprised to be connected to a quite knowledgeable guy from Georgia (In the United States). Zero time on hold, took less than five minutes to get everything that I need, and I had the cds in two days.
Compare this to Toshiba, where I have not only never gotten anyone who remotely speaks English, but every repair also seems to involve shipping your laptop back to them, and waiting for two weeks for "parts" that you were told would be in stock every day for a week.
I've also heard good stories about Apple, but nothing can beat my experience with IBM so far.
I needed to reinstall XP Pro, but didn't have the disk. So I called; the first guy told me it wasn't covered under the warranty (not true; I had the uber-extended-lifetime warranty), then finally agreed to send it to me. Sent me XP Home instead.
Second person, same deal - sent me XP Home after apologizing for not getting it right. Waited several weeks; it never came.
Third person, "we needed to order more disks" (this is after 3 weeks of waiting for a disk that usually takes 3 to 5 days to come). Promised to send a disk.
After 2 weeks, fourth person: "our database says you've already gotten it". After checking the dates, I point out that that was the *first* disk I was sent - the XP Home one - that I'd already told him about. He checked with tech support, and found out that their database has the same order # for Home and Pro. Corrected the order number, and (hopefully) sent me the Pro disk.
It's been 4 days, so I'm still waiting. And the worst of it is that they always get my "service tag" wrong. It's got an M in it, so it's understandable that they'd mistake it for an N, but I spell it out in the international phonetic alphabet every time. Jeez. I decided to just install Home, since they said I could keep the disks. I have Office Pro, anyway. Anyone know how to do an easy (translation: without data/program loss) upgrade? And yes, of course I finally found the Pro disk the day after I installed home, despite having been looking for it for 5-6 weeks at least.
Oh, and don't forget - you can't lodge a complaint through the phone system. You have to use their website. Smells like BS to me. How many people are going to take the time to do that extra step?
Here's a good example of Sony ingenuity.
.MSI file to create the bootdisk. So I can't create it because I run Linux. Further, it will not run on any other system because it detects the hardware is not compatible with the BIOS update. How about letting us download the flash util and the update so we can make our own bootdisk?
I have a Sony Vaio laptop that is giving me troubles with the video driver under Linux. It uses the Neomagick graphics chip which is crappy but should be able to do 2D dosktop stuff just fine.
I thought upgrading the BIOS might get rid of the artifacts I see in X all the time. I went to their site to grab the latest BIOS for the machine. The BIOS on their site is in the form of a bootdisk that will do the upgrade for you. That's great. So what's the problem? The _make_ you run a Windows only
It infuriates me that they would force me to have Windows installed just to update the BIOS.
BigFiber.net
I love Apple too, but for another reason: I bought a snow-white keyboard from them, it arrived at the end of the week. After unpacking it and using it a bit, I saw that the spacebar key was a bit crooked. It was also a bit annoying for me to use, as I type a lot in my profession.
I called Apple, and they said it was not problem for me to exchenge the KB at a local Mac dealer. I went to the Mac dealer, and they were asshats to an extreme extend (The store is going south fast, as they are using all the time to blame Apple instead of taking care of customers.)
I hung around the store for ten minutes as the second in line for service, and listened to the four people in the offices playing Snood and complaining to their bosses about how Apple rips them off. That might be true, but you still need to SELL something if you're in the selling computers-thingy.
As I could not exchange the KB there, instead they got angry with me, I called Apple again. They were shocked to hear about the treatment and sent me a new KB. This was friday afternoon. On monday morning, the new KB had arrived. I unpacked it and installed it, getting ready to send the old one back. After installing it I discovered that it lacked the Æ, Ø and Å keys. And I kinda need them to write norwegian.
So I called Apple again, and talked to a kind customer service woman. She heard my story, verified it in their log and said: "God, this is embarrasing", and sent a new KB next day delivery. This was Monday afternoon. Tuesday morning, the new KB arrived, with all the keys, none crooked. But it was the 2002 model, not the 2003 model.
So, again, I called Apple.
This time I said: "Look, I'm not complaining. There has been some fuckups, but your behaviour has been kinda superb in handling it. But the KB is not the one I ordered. I can, however, keep it for a small reimbursement"
The representative said: "What kind of reimbursement did you have in mind?"
"Well, I could really use an Apple Mouse"
"And how much do you want to pay for it?"
"Well, about 30 USD sounds fair"
"And would that be a wired or a wirless one?"
"You know, the wireless is veeeeeery nice..."
"I see. Let me talk to my manager about this, please hold"
I held the line for two minutes, before she returned. "Do you have Bluetooth in your Mac?" she asked.
"Yes, it's a new Powerbook" I responded.
"In that case, I'm sending you a new Bluetooth Apple mouse, free of charge as a was of saying sorry for the mishaps." she said.
After giving her my CC number (without exp. date), she brought up the old order and added the mouse to it. five minutes after, I brought the old order up in Safari and saw that the mouse was due to be delivered soon.
This is, bar none, the best customer treatment I have ever recieved. The fucked up, yes, but really, really went out of their way to unfuck it. And I got a new Bluetooth mouse to replace the piece of crap that is the Microsoft Bluetooth mouse.
And I like typing on the 2002 KB better. Win - win - win...
NTL support in the UK is a son of a bitch. That isn't to say the tech support staff are crap; they're usually very knowledgable and very helpful, but the service itself sucks.
You ring up, and you're asked to key in your phone number. Why couldn't they just get it through caller ID? Then you're guided through the familiar maze o' optiions(tm) until you wait for 20 minutes listening to Brian Eno shite interspersed with "Your call is valuable to us, so we put you on hold you dozy twat". Then you get to a person.
I remember one time my broadband had gone tits up. So I called up, got through, said I was using Linux and was told they didn't support it. End of story, they refused even to run generic ping tests, just no Linux ever. (The company is part owned by Microsoft btw). It just so happens I had a Windows XP partition which hadn't been booted for a month or two, so I booted that up and called support again. This was at the height of the Blaster outbreak, so they screened all the calls to make sure that all XP users had the patches etc. I said that I didn't, but it didn't really matter since the XP install had been untouched since a month or two ago and I just want to get some generic tests run anyway. What did they do?
They said I couldn't be put through to tech support and they wouldn't do anything because I didn't have the Blaster patches that I couldn't get for an OS I didn't use. The reason I needed the patches was because I might have a virus which can do no damage anyway because there was no Internet connection. So to get the patches for this virus which doesn't do anything, I need them to fix the internet connection, however they won't fix it as I didn't have the patches.
Sons of bitches. If anyone from NTL is reading this, GET SOME FUCKING LINUX SUPPORT YOU COCKS.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Way back in 1986 I got my first lappy (a Toshiba T1000, I wish I still had) It arrived in the mail on a Friday. Saturday morning, all alone with a cup of coffee, I fired it up and started playing. After no more than 10 minutes I went to drink some coffee, and I bumped the coffee cup against the top of the unfolded lappy, spilling coffee on the keyboard. The T1000 instantly died.
I was crushed.
I called customer service on Monday, and got a nice oriental gentleman.
me: My computer is broken.
him: just send it in.
me: but I spilled coffee on it!
him: wipe coffee off, send computer in.
All I paid was shipping to them, the fix was free and fast.
Ahh, I loved the 80's.
-- www.globaltics.net
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