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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..."
This isn't based on a customer survey - it's based on three contrived problems and the phone calls that went with them. Because of the incredibly small sample, you really can't generalize - the results are essentially random. Too bad, because a lot of people will probably just look at the scorecard and never notice the incredibly lame way they did the survey.
And frankly I'd rather pay less for a laptop and deal with the service not being so great. I have a hunch this is true with a lot of people.
If a company were to start advertising, 'Hey- our laptops cost more but you get the best service.' I bet they wouldn't sell as well as the company beating their prices.
With the wealth of knowledge available on the web-- I don't usually use support anyway. My family that aren't as tech savvy? They bring their issues to me. They don't use the support either.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
If your going to keep my on hold and listening to music, please dear god stop interupting the songs every 15-20 seconds with an automated voice giving me a sales pitch, or thanking me for being a customer, or assuring me a tech is working on the problem. Let me listen to the damn music uninterrupted while I wait.
On the plus side, one tech support line, ( I think it was 3com) had a voice at the start of the hold cue that said, Press 1 for classical music, Press 2 for Jazz, Press 3 for classic rock.... That was pretty nice
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
The problem is that if they listened to everyone who says "I know what I'm doing with computers!", they'd spend all day shipping out new computers to thousands of people whose cat knocked the power cord out of the outlet.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
These problems are even more ridiculous when you look at what they did to their apple laptop. As a reference point, Apple has the highest ranked Tech Support by Consumer Reports for both desktops and laptops. In one phone call, they decided this was not the case--apparently conducting surveys of thousands of people is unnecessary.
They also chose different problems for the mac--booting off a non-existent network drive? How is this even remotely a real-world problem? Furthermore, holding down option while rebooting lets you choose the drive your computer will boot from--which is a fix for the problem. If they reset the preference after they booted so that it broke again, that's not Apple's fault.
Misconfiguring wi-fi is also an amazingly horrible test. There's no way to know what settings someone's wireless network and router use, unless you're the LAN administrator. Apple was more than correct to refer them to the manufacturer of the router--could you tell me, right now, what my IP, DNS, Gateway, and hostmask settings should be? What about the SSID and password for my router?
The test was stupidly conducted, and worse yet, only conducted once. Their results were meaningless.
I worked as an AppleCare support rep. If a customer doesn't feel that the issue is resolved (and clearly these "testers" didn't) then all they have to do is ask to have the issue escalated.
About the broken Wifi "test" - there are *so many* brands of 802.11 base stations out on the market that if you're not getting any network information at all, and the computer thinks everything is ok (Tiger has a nice "Network Diagnostic" utility) then suggesting that you contact the manufacturer of the 802.11 base station certainly isn't a bad thing at all. It's a *third party product* (I'm goign to assume that they did't try with an Airport Base Station, because if they did, Apple would have addressed it.) and Apple's policy was to not even try to support 3rd party products.
The write up was pretty vague, and that's sad.