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Mobile Magazine's Notebook Tech Support Reviews
antdude writes "Mobile Magazine tested companies' technical support for their notebooks/laptops. Each test had three calls to each of ten major notebook manufacturers (added three additional vendors since last year). Also, called three third-party providers of PC help. On the whole, what they found was a sea of ignorance -- and annoying fixation with pinning down our name, address, and serial numbers. Things haven't gotten any better since our 2004 test -- and most of the vendors we tested have actually gotten worse..."
"Our laptops cost more but you get the best service" is basically how IBM and Apple expect to sell pricey high-end laptops to professionals. My experience with Apple support was pretty lousy: after Apple diagnosed my hard drive as faulty, it took 18 days to get my laptop back with a new drive. Apple's tech reps changed their story every time I called -- one day it was "we received the part and need to install it" and the next day it was "we just need to order your new part!". Even Compaq turned things around within a week once I got through their awful phone support.
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From someone who did t/s for years I can assure you that from the accounting/shareholders perspective, tech support is nothing but a hole. It is a money loser that they would rather consign to the depths than invest in training, customer contact database upgrades, etc; I used to hear it repeatedly that support wasn't a \revenue\generator.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Consumer Reports has a somewhat up to date chart of their most recent survey for tech support for Laptops and Desktops.
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http://www.consumerreports.org/main/detailv4.jsp?
As a former tech-support rep for Dell, I can at least understand what's going on there.
First off, Dell doesn't do the work themselves. They outsource their tech-support to another company (whom I worked for). They've got call centers across the US and in other countries. The trouble is, if one call center is being overwhelmed, you call will get bumped to another. When that happens, you might get put into the wrong queue (home users ending up on the business lines), which means you'll have to hang up and call again. Each queue is only allowed to handle their particular service area. So, if you have an Inspiron laptop at home, you can't get any help from the desktop techs or the business laptop techs. And they can't transfer calls to another queue.
Further, the call centers close up shop at midnight local time. All remaining calls in queue then get bumped west. After midnight in California, that means you're getting a foreign call center until 8 am Eastern.
The serial numbers, however, are a good thing. When you call in, you're asked to read off the Service Tag for your machine, which allows the tech to not only pull up technical specs on your individual Dell, but to see your prior call history. That way, they know that the last time you called in you were having X problem, and the tech recommended Y solution, or that they sent out a replacement hard drive, etc.
In all, it wasn't a bad job (aside from rude or hysterical callers). Just tedious, and you had little chance to interact with your co-workers, or even your supervisors. Hell, I never did find out what my supervisor's name was, because I never met her in person.
At all.
Most calls to support have little to do with actual problems.
Most calls to support are from the 95% of the population that calls because 'the internet is broken, please fix it, I bought my computer from you'.
So, they have procedures to deal with these 95%.
No, "I know my stuff, just trust me" won"t work - everyone says that.
Your best bet is to play along, nicely.
Spontaneously providing precise and to the point information gets you out of the dummy filters faster. Of course, the question is then, can you get to someone who can actually fix the poroblem.
This is the real problem.
Bashing the dummy-filtering procedure is pointless. Focusing on the eventual availability of someone with the knowledge/power to fix things is what matters.
In my opinion, Scientology is a cult you should avoid.
Instead of me calling up Gateway and saying "Hey my modem is fried, I know what I'm doing with computers, send me a new one" I have to go through an hour of pointless troubleshooting.
Get a real warranty. When the hard drive in my Dell D600 laptop died, I phoned the support number, gave them the serial number, said "the hard drive died and your diagnostic utility is saying <insert error message here>", and I had a new hard drive before 9AM the next morning.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Well my 2 cents: #1 Is theoretically possible, maybe in a new hardware installation that disabled an old device driver and attempted (and failed) to load a new one. Though if you're installing new hardware, would that void your warranty?
#2 Also tricky to pull, I'd have to assume negligence in setting up your Internet settings is what caused this (or why play with that?). Perhaps you were setting up a new ISP, complete with new settings when you hit that checkbox.
#3 I'm suspecting a trojan or other malware doing something at that point. What else could corrupt explorer.exe?
...in bed
Yes, actually that was a 3com thing, I worked with US Robotics and when they split off in 97-98(?) we kept the music going... we even had the option of changing what songs were played as long as it was along the lines of Classical, Jazz, Adult Contemporary, or Classic Rock. We found ourselves in hold limbo all the time with the RMA dept as they fuddled around with their computers trying to get all of the information. Let me tell you there's nothing better than some smooth Miles Davis to cool you down after listening to some screaming your ears off because their 56kbps modem just died.