How not to suck when things don't work? *epic length*

[Primer]

I bought a Compaq laptop for one reason only--it was about $300 on sale at Wally World. I use it only for work, so I was able to take it off on taxes. It kinda sux having enough medical expenses to be able to itemize deductions!

[wagegoth]

I've had good service from Dell's Indian call center. I bought my Dell about five years ago. However, their decision to go Tier 1 in the Philippines has made me a crankier bitch.

Before that, I had a Gateway, which was a bad decision, and their call center sucked rhino dong. I can usually understand Indian accents pretty well; I've had several Indian coworkers, but the accents were so heavy I had to ask for a supervisor so I could get someone to talk with that I could understand. Gateway wanted me to ship the entire computer to their repair center, at my cost , which I refused to do. Then, after I started getting bitchy, the supervisor told me I could take it to a Gateway store and the store would handle it. It did get fixed, but that's why I bought Dell the next time I needed a computer.

[Sonoma]

I think it's Sitel and vCustomer that HP uses over in India now because they are cheaper and are willing to embrace the mission of screwing the customer so hard they run to Dell. For all I know they could have gone back to using Convergys...but I do know that HP has pulled most of their contracts from my old site. Looks good on them, but that's another rant...

OK, this post gave me the heebie-jeebies. I had the misfortune of working for 2 of the 3 listed companies. After Convergys, Sitel actually looked good by comparison.

On topic, I knew going in that Dell's customer service did not have the greatest reputation. I ordered my laptop from them, and so far (2 years later) have not had to contact them. For that, I am very thankful.

I was very pleased with their production speed though. I ordered the computer in the morning, and by that afternoon, their production-tracking system showed that it already had software loaded & was in testing. Got it several days earlier than they had initially estimated.

[Eric the Grey]

Don't know what to say other than, you get what you pay for.

If you had done some research (not trying to be snotty) you would have found that Compaq (HP) has some of the worst notebooks out there and CS sucks.

Some times you just gotta pay the two dollars for it to be cheaper in the end.

Sometimes, you have to be firm and/or a bit sucky to get through to people, but at least you didn't start out that way and blindside someone from the start. This, to me is the signature mark of a Real SC.

It seems to me that the HP customer service center(s) not only don't know what their doing, but don't know what the rest of the company is doing.

I've had a Compaq laptop for a little over 3 years now and it's still working fine, thanks to the HP repair center.

I spilled coffee in my keyboard and immediately shut it down to avoid any problems. I dug around a bit and tried to clean it out but couldn't figure out how to get the keyboard out, so I closed it all back up and took the risk and called HP to see if it was covered.

The rep I spoke to (English as far as I can tell) assured me it would be covered, so we made arrangements to have it shipped out to repair (all at their expense),

A couple weeks later, I get a call telling me that the repair would not be covered, but they could repair it for $850. I only paid 675 for the laptop new. I quizzed the woman several times about why I was told differently but she could not shed any light on it, so I told her to just send it back and I would find a replacement for it.

When I got it back, it worked just fine. The only thing I could figure out was the repair tech's decided to get a jump on it, fixed the problem assuming it would be paid for.

Said laptop has had very few problems since. Some of the control buttons (volume/mute & on/off sometimes require a couple of pushes to get them to work, but that's all.)

I will admit though, I take pretty good care of it, especially since the whole hot coffee incident...



Eric the Grey