Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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
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...
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 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.