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Buy an Elite HP PC, Get Your Own Support Staffer
jfruh writes "HP reversed its decision to spin off its PC business, but it's still left with the question of how to make money in a commodity business selling standard-issue machines manufactured overseas. One idea they're contemplating: improved customer service. If you buy an HP 'Elite' PC and have problems, you won't have to phone into a tech support call center where an entry-level drone reads off a script and tells you to reboot the machine; you'll have access to a specific support tech who will work with you as long as you own the computer."
Thank you...
But my local indian restaurante is good enough :)
Seriously HP, starting with better basic Customer support would gain you more market share.
If Dell can figure it out, so can you.
until they leave the company. Or go on holiday. Or Maternity leave. Or sick. Or get promoted.
Look HP I get it, Chinese labor is cheap, and there are a lot of Chinese people to spare but I just don't see how this is feasible. Plus just imagine the shipping and handling? Plus where is it going to sleep?
I get it you don't want to seem behind on the times with apple using cheap drones to assemble all it's products but including one with each PC bought might be pushing it.
What the hell is a PC?
24/7 and for at least 1-2 years sounds like good job security
What happens when said support person quits?
What happens if the person quits? Or is on vacation/sick when you need support? Or is just plain incompetent?
This seems to be a promise to provide less reliable support then what we have now.
Anyone who has had a little help-desk experience can already imagine the horrors of having to deal with a specific annoying customer every fucking time he calls for help
Whoever is assigned as your support tech will still be under the same policies meant to minimize costs to HP, that means limited training and script reading. Given the turnover in tech support, even an "assigned" drone will likely be some random person by the time you need help. This sounds more like marketing than an actual change in policy.
Tables and phones supplement PCs, not replace them.
HP was foolish to suggest their PC business had no value publicly while at the same time trying to sell it off. They bungled the Palm/WebOS purchase. They dropped billions simply to show up late to market with nothing new to offer. If they used it as a base but came up with a clever innovation, they might have made an in road into the market.
They've been poorly run basically since the Compaq merger, which is a shame because I prefer HP over Dell, especially for servers.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
When I was working in IT, I greatly preferred dealing with HP's support over Microsoft, Autodesk, etc. I'd call them up, read off the serial number, tell them the CD drive was dead, and they'd send a replacement with a shipping label to send the dead one back. With Microsoft or Autodesk, I had to jump through a million hoops to get any real support. Then I went to work for HP as a software developer and learned to loathe them. The company is good at taking care of its customers, but when it comes to its employees they're just a resource to be exploited, like a forest is to a lumber company.
I wouldn't bother paying extra for dedicated support personnel, unless they were here in the U.S. If they're still just some poor Indian schmuck working the night shift in a call center on the other side of the world, then I'll pass. If they're here on American soil, in one of the 4 main time zones (sorry HI and AK), then I'd pay more.
How does (Score:0, Funny) even exist? I'm calling HP tech support to find out.
You see, I already have three cats. I don't know if I can afford anymore food for something like a support staffer.
I'm surprised at all the negativity. This sounds like basically the same thing as when I worked IT and I had my own rep at the mail-order houses like CDW and PC Warehouse. In practice, did it make a damn bit of difference to me whether my official rep took my order or somebody else did? Nope, not really. All my info, including discounts, etc., was in the computer. But it was nice to have a number to call and a specific person with whom I could leave a message if need be, and to be able to say stuff like, "I need more of those things I got on Friday, but listen, one of them already broke" -- without having to walk through some script with an anonymous sales rep. It was just that slight bit more of a human interaction that made the whole transaction a little bit more pleasant, even though I was intellectually aware that it probably wasn't making what I needed to do much easier by any measurable amount.
Breakfast served all day!
The only thing that will change is that you're getting a dedicated person. You'll still get someone that's likely to be hired on a disposable basis as opposed to someone that is treated like a long-term investment.
Seen it with the folks that have repaired my Thinkpads, and the contractors had very little respect for the equipment that they were repairing. The only worse fate is to send the machine in for depot service, where things are likely to be broken as much as they are fixed.
Then again, I shouldn't be surprised when they were hired based on multiple parties distrusting them. I won't be surprised if this is the case with HP.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
[ 100th call that day, only a few moment from the last one... ]
Customer: "yeah, hi again, so errm, the computer still doesn't seem happy. I don't think it liked the way you said goodbye to it last time. Say it again, but this time with feeling - it is listening..."
Tech: places noose around neck, loads into office paper shredder and presses go...
Having a single person take care of support issues is a great idea. There are lots of reasons I'd find that appealing, as a business customer (who are the majority of buyers getting HP Elite products).
The most appealing reason, though, would be that I'd communicate with one single person through a given service interaction -- which can often span multiple calls or emails. One of the most frustrating aspects of lowest-cost CS is that every interaction is handled by a different drone, so you end up answering the same question over and over and over again. This has the potential to quickly lead to very poor CS from the customer's viewpoint.
So, even assigning a given ticket to one drone for the life of the ticket would be a huge step forward. Huge. (And speaking with someone who claims their name is Bob, Richard, or Jane but is clearly from Bangalore because I can't frikken' understand a word they say ... well, that's also very poor CS. Maybe Elite product customers would also get a CS rep local to their country? That would be fantastic.)
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
So lets take an analogy for this one step further: Should Mercedes Benz and BMW offer a "personal tech" for their Yuppie clients to find out that maybe they should check the air in the tires now and then? Or come to a full stop at that red light ahead of you? Just how far do we go with this kind of "coddling the monied incompetent" do we go? If you want to operate a car you have get training and demonstrate some basic level of competence. Why doesn't the same hold true for the ubiquitous machine? More 1% elitism.
Is that you'll have to buy another elite pc after the chip expires.
You mean besides the $2.35 BILLION they made in 2011?
Or I could spend a Saturday learning damn near everything there is to know about how to setup computers and their hardware for basic home use, build my own high quality computer out of parts I ordered and put together, and have no one to answer to but myself (and warranty holders) if something breaks. I'm at my own availability 24/7 and don't have to risk getting a "Well what did you think you could do with the low end model? Play flash games? No, you need a high end PC for that."
Note: I'm an experienced computer tech who does all this already, but if I were starting at the level of barely being able to use a mouse, I'd totally go this route.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Why do you need a person when you could call into a app that would lead you down the same path as a human?
Personally, I think this is a great plan. I'm not sure it'll make me buy an HP instead of a computer from system76, but it's definitely a great idea.
That said, my last call to HP tech support for one of my IPS monitors went pretty well once I got past the first 2 levels of non-English-speaking drones, and their actual rep who came out to my house with the replacement display was fantastic. No dumb questions, good communication, and fast replacement service.
Dear HP,
You already lost my business in 2008. Doing this isn't going to bring it back.
Oh? You want to know WHY you lost my business for good?
Four words: "Defective Nvidia GPU debacle".
Gateway tried this in the early 00s, I was working tech support for them at the time, later on their business unit (MPC) tried it again. The first time Gateway tried it they almost immediately stopped the Assigned Tech stuff and went with an instant access queue, which they again killed off about 6 months later. Neither company really exists anymore (MPC folded over 3 years ago and Gateway exists in name only).
Really HP when you get involved in commodities you either need to produce enough cheap enough to make a profit or you need to get out of the game, there really aren't a lot of alternatives here.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
I can't even commit to paper or plastic and now you want me to deal with *this?*
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Entry level tech positions have an increadibly high turn over rate and the difference between a tech and a call center agent is a minor distinction if you're a call center agent or a tech who works on the phones, its incredibly soul sucking boring work that few can tolerate for an extended period of time.
The only way i can see this working is with higher salaries and a modicum of respect towards techs but then the cost of the service will increase the price of the hardware to a point most people wont be willing to pay for a 'better' customer service experience which every one and there dog claims to offer anyway
Seems to me this is a pipe dream or a marketing ploy at best
Since HP is wondering how to make money in a commodity business, here are a few suggestions.
- Change the business model to one where the device is a physical device that enables a valuable service to be provided to the customer. This is in contrast to the current model where a computerized device is sold to the masses for the lowest price while providing just enough tech support to be competitive with other companies who are doing the same.
- Have a "subscription-style" approach to "owning" laptops, pads, smartphones, etc. The user pays $n/month and gets a certain level of performance (in terms of physical size, weight, battery life, processor power, storage). Every so often, say every 6 months, the user turns in the current unit for the latest and greatest device which permits him to keep the level of performance as technology marches forward.
- Have an online backup service so in case there is a problem the user can have access to his data and profile (OS and app settings) so he can get by from another device for a day or two until a replacement is Fedexed to him (which has his data and profile installed just as they were on his other device). The user thus avoids the hassle of rebuilding the software environment on the new device.
- Have the laptop/pad/smartphone family of offerings be architected such that they merely "I/O devices" that allow a user to access the data and profile info that is on a card or online. This would make transitioning from one laptop to another very easy, permitting a user to use whatever mobile device makes sense at the time, yet have all of his info and preferences always correct without having to spend time doing admin chores on a stable of devices. See Opera Link for a flavor of this, but take it to its logical conclusion for a suite of devices.
- Have a service to provide sanitized systems to non-Chinese users who visit China.
"You'll have a specific entry-level drone in Argentina who reads off a script and tells you to reboot the machine."
It will be so much more satisfying that way.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
for a large number of computer problems?
Working at a help desk for at least 6 months should be required for entry into any IT job. It will help you hone your people skills and will help you to appreciate your career decision(once you never have to work help desk again).
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
"you'll have access to a specific support tech who will work with you as long as you own the computer" Now instead of many "techs" reading a script from their monitor, I'll just be dealing with one. I'm assuming they will still have me troubleshoot for a software problem when I've already identified that a known good working hardware part resolved the issue. Care to try again HP??
I am surprised HP has 'support' at all. Some years ago family member bought a hp laptop. He used the online help im feature once, and since he was not an american was told no help was available via the oem of windows that hp 'insist' on providing and not customising for the eu.
His next pc wont be from HP for some reason
"It puts the lotion on its skin, or else it cleans the registry again".
*Shudder*
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Part of the issue with outsourcing the manufacturing is that they won't innovate in manufacturing anymore. many companies have gotten a leg up on the competition by figuring out a new way to make the same thing. You don't do that unless you actually make it and are familiar at a visceral level with how it is built.
I'm not saying have a huge factory. Just something large enough that they're still doing a little manufacturing. Enough to understand it. enough to play with it. enough to innovate with the materials. And if they do that, they could come up with something new. And then the chinese competitors don't matter because they don't have the new thing.
I think we can build in the US. We just need to automate a lot more. I've seen a lot of impressive robots that are very dextrous. I see no reason why we couldn't replace those hands with US robots. It's not as sexy as trying to get the jobs in US hands directly. But a factory in the US will require techs to keep them working. And will need supplies which will need to be trucked into the factory. And all sorts of stuff. All of that will bleed into the community. Maybe the local restaurants get a little more business. Maybe a few more homes sell. Maybe a little more tax money comes into a small town. We could do that across the US. Automate.
I know its an investment and the foreign labor is dirt cheap. But it gives the company something they don't have now... Control. They used to have that. They used to have some control over the stuff they made and now... it's all off in some foreign factory where nine times out of time we're just teaching a new competitor how to make our high tech stuff on OUR dime. It's like sending your competition to school and paying for it. I'm happy giving the chinese low tech factories but we were mad to outsource the high tech stuff.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Congratulations, you've just rediscovered the Keynesian principle of Demand side economics that got us out of the last great economical depression, lets get working on that tried and tested approach shall we?
as logn as it's not call time based as no people skills in dump people off of the phone to get a good call time.
I'm not employed by them, but I am fiercely loyal to the brand and they pretty much have me as a customer for life...because of the very thing that HP is trying to sell here.
When I first got Tiny, my 11.5lb beast of a laptop that plays Crysis maxed out without flinching, it was having an issue where it would randomly BSOD. "ZoMg ItS wInDoEs!!!!111"...no it's not - my Dell XPS M1730 BSOD'd once in two years of running Win7. Having Tiny BSOD several times in a single sitting...not the same thing. So I called Origin's tech support. They had me test my RAM and my hard disk, which both came out clean. They had me try an excellent utility called WhoCrashed and run Furmark overnight. They FTP'd a complete set of drivers to my FTP server for me to try. When we finally decided that it wasn't a software error, they replaced virtually every piece of hardware available: they offered me a new hard disk (which I declined since the OEM drive checked out and I tried a spare I had lying around which yielded the same results), and new RAM, which I didn't need. They swapped out the CPU (which they later let me trade up for the newer model at the cost of the difference a new customer would pay), and they swapped out the laptop chassis, all the while being perfectly okay with sending me parts and letting me do my own warranty work so I wouldn't have any downtime. It finally ended up being the wireless chipset, which the promptly overnighted me (and again, let me upgrade later at a price differential). Two months later, the GPU died. A new one was on my desk the next morning after a phone call that lasted less than five minutes, WITH hold and transfer times.
My support rep Alvaro has even helped me through the simple things. I was at an event, getting ready to DJ in four hours...and all of my MP3s were missing. While in a calmer state of mind I would have been alright, starting Serato, having none of your audio files on the drive (but your folder structure still intact), and being 150 miles away from the FreeNAS containing your backup is what I'd call the textbook definition of "a situation that'll put basically anyone in panic mode". Perhaps y'allz are better under stress than I am, but in that state, my brain basically turned into the product of a box of Fig Newtons and a Cuisinart. Alvaro was calm, understanding, and even though I 100% admitted that it was a PEBKAC/ID10T error, he did everything he could to help me find stuff, suggested a few data recovery tools, and helped get me back into focus to the point where I realized that it was, in fact, all there, but on the wrong hard disk.
How much was this beast of a machine (3.2GHz Core i7, 6GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM, 1x500GB Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid HDD, 2xWestern Digital Scorpio 7200RPM 320GB HDDs, nVidia Geforce 460M, Intel 6300abgn wifi, bluetooth, webcam, DVD-RW, custom painted lid, spare battery, spare power adapter, 2 year parts/labor warranty) along with personal tech support like that? $3,400USD. And it was worth every single cent.
You will never understand the peace of mind that comes with being able to call a phone number and say "hey Alvaro, it's Joey", and have him know exactly what to expect, and know that he's not going anywhere until the problem is resolved. I've never read the man a serial number in my life. I assume it's on the bottom somwhere, but I've never been asked for it.
Have at it, HP. Origin set the standard. I'd love to see it happen. However, I personally don't think they've got the corporate culture for that to happen.
Reasons why I don't buy HP consumer products. Laptops which break after 6 months and need new motherboards, this has happened to friends of mine unfortunate enough to buy one. Coincidence, maybe. Why do i need 300+ megs of required software to print from an HP device? I would consider my pc clone to be an elite pc, even by todays standards and I have never needed dedicated tech support.
On the other hand if I were to buy server, I would consider an HP product. If it wasn't my money.
They should take the lead from Acer, their low end laptops are great and affordable (havent had to deal with their tech support and they seem to run no matter what you throw at them).
If they improve the quality of their products they'll have less support requests and more customers.
specific support tech who will work with you as long as you own the computer.
Ah, so I'll consistently get the same guy instructing me to re-install the video drivers (last updated 2010) again in hopes it will somehow be magically different this time?
I swear, HP stops updating their laptop graphics drivers before the next model even hits the factory floor, and OEM drivers are broken thanks to HP's customizations. Thanks to my laptop being one of HPs more obscure models, there's not even much community support -- the only working hacked set is one published by some semi-nonymous Russian dude, who rolled up the installation in his own executable package, including detailed instructions on how to bypass Win7-x64 driver signing (Welcome to Botnet).
We had a fairly beefy box of a HP server get dumped on our dock at a company who sold overstock and NOS computers, this was back in the late 90's and we had people factory certified for many different brands, I did Apple and Compaq, we had some IBMer's in there yadda yadda we didnt have a HP guy at the time.
This mini fridge HP server had 1 simple issue on first glance, NTLDR is missing (windows NT4), so management made some calls and a guy showed up the next day. Once we showed him where he could setup shop he then proceeds to bring in a freaking library of 3 ring binders full of checklists and starts on page 1. After about a week of us walking in every morning snarking "dude, reinstall NT already" he came to the page where it apparently gave him enough of a flow chart to evaluate that Windows NT4 needed to be reinstalled.
Second week in he try's the restore media provided and it does not work, he concludes that the media is bad and orders another copy, which takes another 3 days. End of week he gets the new restore media and it does not work. It takes another 3 fucking days for him to figure out that the CD rom is bad (apparently this thing had been dropped in shipping).
already long story short it took this HP expert nearly 2 months to replace the 1 hard disk, 1 cd-rom and reinstall windows NT4 while me and one other person were cranking out 30 deskpros an hour with like a 2% return rate due to hardware problems mostly caused by shipping.
You can get a US-based specialized representative who will key you in on all the current 'torrent and free porn sites' :)
I don't see how they can do that. Callcentre turnover rates are probably on the order of two weeks.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
Depending on how it is implemented, this would get me as a customer.
I am very, very pragmatic when it comes to large purchases. I usually buy cheap refurbed, last-gen computers because of the huge cost savings. I expect to get what I pay for, therefore I put up with a lot of crap from my hardware.
For support like that, I am willing to move to the full priced high end. I need to be confident that my stuff will last longer.
This would also be great for my parents/grandparents.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
expect a technician to mess up the PC when replacing HW, then get refusal from HP to do anything until you have reinstalled to factory defaults, if you'd even know how to do that.