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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.
Hello, this is Steve Rahashapemndadshomafaridsuaoia, how may I help you?
Click
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?
but my VoIP on my laptop didn't work and since it was a network problem ...
Um, hello?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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?
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
I only buy those notebooks with the black marbled covers and the wide ruled sheets inside. I don't see a help line number on any of them, but then they've never given me any problems, so I've never needed to call anyone.
Back when I did tech support, I'd say 90% of the problems I encountered were software configuration issues, not hardware. When you're calling tech support, it only stands to reason that you actually buy hardware from the manufacturer, which is why people want to know your serial # and address information: Is this our shit? As a lot of software issues can be solved regardless of vendor, it's important they don't waste time/money on someone else's stuff. Surprisingly enough, I had people with Gateways trying to get support from Dell. :/
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
The biggest problem I run into with tech support is the huge amount of rules and regulations the call center people have to follow. 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. For a $5 part with $3 shipping they should just send me the part.
Also the call center person has his/her hands tied when fixing the problem. Recently my cable internet service did not discontinue my service when I told them to. Even though it was obvious they needed to credit my account for the extra month they charged me for, the representative could not due to some rule. If he was trusted to just make the decision things would go much smoother.
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.
In one company I worked, one call wiped out the profit of 5 units sold. Laptops likely make more money per unit, but same concept...
There is -no- incentive for having warm bodies intelligently support a product. An employee like that would:
1. cost too much money/hour and be hard to replace.
2. Take too long with each customer
3. Inspire more phone calls. (support is great right?)
4. Raise the price of the laptop.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
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've posted on this before... one of many episodes of trying to get support. In this particular case, I pretty much KNEW what the problem was, which as I'm sure many/most slashdotters also try to determine before resorting to call tech support.
From the word "go", (ironic), it was clear my dance with HP (love their product... a laptop zx5000) was less about them helping me solve my problem and more about them doing anything they possibly could to avoid doing warranty work! And, once they discovered I had a dual boot machine, they immediately jumped to the claim that dual-booting my machine voided the warranty, though not one of the support people I talked to (I talked to four) could point to the words in the warranty whereby dual-booting my machine really did void the warranty.
This was not a unique experience for me... my typical experience is usually along the lines of:
I don't know what HP and other companies are smoking when they put together "support" staff, but based on empirical and andecdotal evidence they don't "get it". Especially for the slashdot type (not being elitist... just pragmatic) it would be nice to be able to get to a support call where you either get to skip the preamble (see above list) and immediately discuss symptoms and possible causes along with solutions.
So, bottom line, I see the problem being:
Oh, and I don't see this getting better soon, if ever. Sigh.
Acer deserve the bottom place in this experiment. My father's Aspire failed six months after he bought it, and he sent it back. It took almost three months, a gang of lawyers, and an Internet campaign to get it back from them fully repaired.
We rapidly found out that other people had had even worse problems, and that Acer's support system is not to be relied upon to get the job done quickly. As such, I've been put off a manufacturer that had previously seemed decent. Avoid at all costs.
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
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.
and annoying fixation with pinning down our name, address, and serial numbers.
With the serial numer they can see if you are still entiteld to have support or not. Also they can see what hardware/software you have as a standard. A typical call:
Hello, my DVD bruner does not work.
- What is your serial?
123-456-789
The DVD-burner was not in there at the moment of purchase. We can not give support on that. Sorry.
The same happens with (non-included) software, like Outlook instead of Outlook Express.
People call to ask support on their Longhorn Beta instalation.
This can all be nice, but if you can vut down costs by several precent by banning these calls, what would you do if you have several hundred people working for you?
The serial number can also be enough to filter people out who had to call another company (ibm customers calling HP)
The timeconsuming part of entering name and adress and so on is because out of respect and because of cost. If I need to send you a new instalation CD, I want to be sure you get it. (The same goes for marketing that uses the same data)
Normaly this happens only the first time. The second time a simple verification should be enough.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I have had nothing but problems with their Tech Support. The laptop I have works excellently...well, when it works. I've sent it back to them no less than 3 times for issues. First time, my HDD died. I was on the phone for about 2 hours while we discussed ways to test whether it was really dead or just sorta dead and therefore not covered by the warranty...after sending it in, I called for a status update. Response? "We have no record of your laptop." They said they would look around and call back. After three hours of waiting, I called them back and they once again said they didn't know where it was, but to call back the next day. Calling back the next day met with a better response of "We found the laptop, but now the Support request has expired, so we have to file a new one, which may take a while." Are you serious? The support request is supposed to last 10 business days. I sent it in 2 days after getting the RMA (I got it on the weekend) and it arrived on Friday, that was 4 days. That's not 10...Not surprisingly, subsequent calls were met with "We've sent the laptop to the repair depot, so you need to talk to them, we'll connect you." The repair depot didn't know what was going on, but they were able to give me a number I could use to reference my case. At least they knew about my laptop. They apparently got it in and worked on it...for a while... All in all, the first call was not a success, it took exactly 30 days from the date they received the laptop to get it back to me, despite having purchased their special quick repair service that guarantees a turnaround of 3 days (business days) even with shipping. Call 2? My motherboard had just flat up died. The computer refused to boot, it just sorta turned on a lit up. This call went a little better as the tech was convinced that it was the motherboard that was dead within 15 minutes and provided me with a case number and shipping materials (part of the special service) which arrived the next day. Sending it in and getting it back took no time at all, less than 3 days as promised, and my problems were fixed (except my touchpad didn't function correctly, but I didn't use it anyways so it could have been a problem previous to this.) Third time was due to my laptop failing to charge. This was resolved in about 2 hours again, as we went through "we don't support batteries out of warranty" for about an hour while I tried to convince them that it wasn't a battery issue, it was the receptor on the laptop had broken loose (which is apparently a common problem among Toshiba laptops according to the "support" forums.) Overall? Toshiba gets a C-. Their Tech Support people are terrible at diagnosing hardware issues as they definitely read from a sheet of questions and they take forever to get anywhere with. Their repair services are very good though, every time I sent in my laptop it came back as good as new (as far as I could tell). Their hardware (when it doesn't fail on me) works incredibly well, and as a bonus, most of the hardware is fully Linux compatible!