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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?"
Posted anon, as its not my story.
s uc k/6701337.html
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I'm so glad this happened to me because I wouldn't have believed it otherwise...
This normal-looking 20-something couple came in tonight and stood at the dropbox just clutching their three movies and staring at me until I asked if I could help them. They then proceeded to tell me that the dvd copy of 'Office Space' they had rented from us had downloaded a virus onto their brand-new dvd player and ruined it. (Anyone who has seen the 'Office Space' dvd knows why this is hilarious--for those of you who haven't seen it, after the FBI warning a Window...a MICROSOFT-LOOKING WINDOW...pops up and says a virus had been detected and, when you hit menu or start, your TELEVISION (i.e. Not Monitor) screen is flooded with pop up windows. After a few seconds you are taken to the dvd's start menu and presented with the usual options.) Even though they looked deadly serious, I thought they were joking and I said as much. The man got a little testy, so I explained to him that it's all a joke and simply part of the movie. They both swore up and down that it wasn't part of the movie and that this virus had destroyed their 2 month old dvd player and, even after I popped out the dvd trailer and put 'Office Space' in and showed them and actually started the movie with no trouble at all...you guessed it: they STILL did not believe me.
I don't think I've ever laughed so hard in my entire life.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/customers_
Me:
I just used a Mac and backed up 20GB of data over 4 DVD-Rs using your Backup 2.0 software. Unfortunately I no longer have a Mac but need to restore those discs, could you tell me what compression/spanning techniques are used by Backup 2.0 so I can retrieve the data?
Apple Rep:
Apple uses all open standards with their software. Thank you.
>:|
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Props to the parent. I have never met a Dell customer who was satisfied with their support. They are so good at reneging on a contract they should go into insurance sales. Incidentally, my dad just killed his Dell with a glass of wine. They wouldn't uphold thier support contract, so he got a sweet Toshiba P20 widescreen laptop. Thier warranty specifically covers against spill damage, and they actually live up to it :)
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.
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.
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...