My Experience with Dell's Namastechnical Support

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HP and Acronis

Ok i'll try to be quick.

In the first year (now almost over) of my HP Laptop's life, it's had to have service 3 times. First for a very early hard-drive failure, and more recently, twice for screen problems, the first repair being botched. But the repair itself is not what this is about.

The first hard-drive repair was straight-forward - the call took a little while as the support person just doesn't believe that 30 years of software experience, nor building dozens of computers myself, qualifies me to know whether the hard-drive is dead. So we go through their checklist and at the end, they agree they'll send me a drive and a recovery DVD, and it's done - not bad.

The next one went GREAT - my screen was getting dim on one side only. Again, a bit of delay as they had me jump through hoops doing some very unlikely things to "fix" the screen, but once that was done, they authorized a return, and that seemed to go very well -- a pre-paid shipping box arrived in a couple days, and the entire thing - shipping it out until getting it back -- was maybe 4 days.

Unfortunately they'd messed up the internal video cable, and the display was a mess. Now the fun starts.

I will give you only the upshot on this: It took 3 phone calls and 3 chats (all with the outsourced Indian support), amounting to about 6 hours total, before they got the authorized to repair.

In fact, it was VERY clear, from things said and attitude, that at least several of their agents did NOT want to help, but just get rid of me. I was told TWICE that the repair was authorized and I'd get a box in the mail - but even a week later, nothing.

EACH time I called or chatted, they had NO record of any earlier conversation, even when I'd told the agent about that fact and he assured me THIS TIME it was on record. This despite have an "Activity ID" given me by the agent. This means each time I contacted them, the agent insisted we go through the same lengthy "debug" already tried and failed.

After the first time of course, I told the agent I would not, that I had and the result was negative, and if they didn't have the records, too bad. Yes, I insisted on talking to supervisors. One time that got me on hold, leading to a "disconnect", which of course means start-all-over as they had no record of THAT call either. Another time it was a 20-minute on-hold (on chat) before a supervisor would talk to me.

In the end, I prevailed and just got that laptop back, apparently fixed. HP should know their support people routinely blame their "computer systems" for failing to have the information about support calls. Very often they said their "network is down" and stuff like that. But folks, come on - this went on for WEEKS. Considering HP's history as a technology company, the irony is inescapable.

I'd rate that experience about as negatively as you could. But... now for the flip-side. Acronis, who make back-up software (probably other things), is apparently using the Indian outsource company that HP should be using.

I had an older product and had questions about licensing and upgrading when moving to Vista. For various reasons, my situation was different than the scenarios on their website, so I initiated online chat with support.

This, in short, was a pleasure. Connection was fast. I ended up talking to three people (as there were reboots I had to perform as part of the procedure I needed to do on their instructions). Each person connected quickly, picked up the thread after a minute or two of reading the prior conversation (which was instantly available to them... listening, HP?) and understood. They wasted NONE of my time - just got to issue at hand and resolved it.

This experience went about as WELL as I could imagine it to go. The issue was resolved, each person was professional and knowledgeable, and despite having to reconnect and get a different agent each time, even THAT went very, very well.

If the majority of people are having negative experiences, and if companies using outsourced support (and having bad responses from their users as a result) are reading this, they should know that it CAN be done right - but they'd best do their research to find out not which companies have the best prices or biggest call centers or most customers, as perhaps that is the problem. They should find out who has the most satisfied customers after support experiences.

Posted by: rberman   Posted on: 06/26/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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