Which Computer Company has the best Customer Service

Which Computer Company has the best Customer Service?

Seriously I had a horrible time with HP.
A lot of the people I got seemed to be just looking troubleshooting steps up on the computer, with no knowledge of anything. I want to get a laptop from a company that can provide decent tech support. Any suggestions?

 

That sucks, considering i have to call them tomorrow because my laptops power cord decided to quit working. This is the first pre-built computer ive ever bought, only because it was a laptop. All of my desktops ive built myself, so i really cant say anything about other companies.

 

This is the definition of help desk... for any company. You talk to the least qualified people first, then work your way up.

 

Dell - Jello my name es Jeffry (obviously an Indian guy) . Jow mey I jelp you today?
Me - I need to know what kind of drivers I need for my motehrboard when I install XP over Vista.
Dell - Ded joo try turning deh computar on den off egen?
Me - That has nothing to do with my problem.
Dell - Ok please hold.
*3 hours and 20 bad 80's songs later*
Dell - Jello? I tink I might be able to jelp joo.
Me - Ok.
Dell - Have you tried starting en safe mode.
Me - *click*

 

I've had good experiences with HP, on my first notebook (2006) my hard drive started to play up (not die, just take an age to access certain part of the drive) and they sent me a replacement drive which I got in 42 hours of the call and they sent me a prepaid mailer to send the other drive to them.

My second laptop bought in the UK (2007) suffered from a total graphics failure, so the machine would boot but would not show any graphics on the lcd screen or via S-Video or VGA, was in Australia, called them up, they collected it, repaired it within 3 days and sent it back to me and it's worked fine every since.

The techinical support is pretty crap, but as the HP machines are well supported you can generally find answers to most questions on forums like notebookreview.com

Generally most companies suck at customer service, but the HP machines generally give you more features for the price.

 

None of them.

Learn both computer science for software issues and electrical engineering for hardware issues. Seriously, customer service is implemented in such a manner to minimize the cost to the company, not to actually help the customer. It is cheaper to outsource to companies which use people with absolutely no computer knowledge (e.g. they typically can only work from the script), and sometimes no idea of what the product they are supporting actually is.

Do not try to use customer support (unless it is a publicly accessible forum) for software support ever. If you have a hardware problem, it is usually easier to just return it to the store you bought it from. In the case where you actually have to deal with the manufacturer, it simply becomes a crap-shoot as to whether or not you can get the support you need.

 

IBM is pretty good.

The best computer whatever company I've dealt with is hands down Crucial. Lifetime warranty and there really nice. lol.

 

I have good experiences w/ HP as well. Via chat, he was able to tell me how to change the region of my printer so I could use Japanese ink carts.

The whole outsourcing thing gets me b/c they're trying to bullshit the consumer. Everyone knows the help desk is outsourced to fucking India. Dont' tell me your name is Mark. If it's too hard to pronounce, just give me the first 2 syllables like every other fucking Indian person I know (and Apu).

 

Hilarious.

Some of the Indian chat people I've talked to have been kind of funny. I had a Microsoft girl tell me I sounded sleepy and should take a nap, lol.

 

I have some decent experience with sony. I once broke of some of my laptop keys while cleaning the keyboard and I got new ones for free.

 

To be honest, everyone is going to have different experiences with the major manufacturers. If you want to do real research, go here:

http://www.notebookforums.com/forumindex.php

 

Dell business support is quite good, but you WILL pay extra for it. You generally speak to an American that knows what they're talking about. Whatever comes standard with their consumer laptops sucks.

Apple's support is also supposed to be pretty good. The only experience I've had with them is having a coworker call them up and order a new fan (the one in my Macbook went bad). It was here the next day. Normally I think they would've sent me a box to ship my Macbook off in, but I work at a certified Apple repair center so I just wound up doing it myself.

In either case you pay extra for decent support.

 

Apple, though I dislike them. My sister in law spilt coffee on her mac book and took it to the New York Apple Store. They repaired it for free.

 

I've had nothing but good experiences with Apple. Anytime I've had problems with my Macbook or iPod, I can take it to an Apple Store.

 

That business model works when each model is sold for the price of two. I have a Macbook Pro though, and I think it rocks.

 

haha, yes! i never thought of it that way. :lol:

 

I have a laptop from everex, and got unlucky with one of the XT5000Ts that had a bad Nvidia GPU that would die about a month or two out of warranty. I called them up, was on the phone for no more than 10-15 minutes (thank god for their phone support being in ohio where I can understand them), and then a couple hours later I had a shipping label to print out in my inbox.

 

I'm personally biased after working for Dell. But my list goes like this:

Apple
Dell

Apple builds awesome machines that do tend to be on the leading edge of some technologies (EFI being my favorite), but they are expensive (really two machines?), and have a history (especially if you pick up the latest model that was released yesterday at macworld) of being finky and troublesome with the machines that come out of the gate (don't believe me, just google for macbook overheat, macbook case cracking, macbook air slowdown). Regardless to that, I purchased a secondhand macbook 2006 that was beat the fark up, had a busted LCD and the case was cracked, and for all intent and purposes out of warranty. After replacing the LCD (the replacement came with the machine) myself and screwing a few things up in the process (wifi stopped working) I took it to the local apple store and they took it into the backroom and 3 hours later I had macbook with new plastics and a working wifi card, and they didn't charge me a thing. If you get an apple, make sure you take it to an apple store to get it fixed. I'd recommend picking up a macbook pro if your into laptops.

Dell is my second favorite. Mostly because I worked for them and know the ins and outs of everything. They do build machines that can take a beating (althought they tend to get very ugly in the process), and really do stand behind their machines (once you navigate the phone tree and escalate to someone who knows and cares), and they have the most liberal warranty of all (you can essentially get a completely new machine either peice-meal or as a genuine exchange depending on whats wrong). I know everyone hates the intial is it turned on troubleshooting but really dell gets a lot of calls from idiots that demand a new machine because they couldn't figure out how to plug it into the wall (consequently, the at home install is the most ordered post-purchase addon, people just need someone to setup, and demo the machine I guess). For this reason frontline agents burnout quickly and thats why you need to escalate.

I could go on forever inregards to dell, but I'll break down the details to this:

Buy an XPS/XPS Studio or Vostro/Latitude/Precision and avoid Inspiron and plain (non XPS) Studio like the plague (unless you want that damn mini, it gets its own queue). The ones I said to buy are all business support so you tend to actually get people that care and are not burnt out by stupid consumers (they deal with IT mostly and very knowledgable consumers).

Edit: Also the agents running chat support are the most over worked people I have ever seen, dealing with upto 8 idiots at a time is horrible.

 

Thats kind of funny that u called to ask for drivers to install xp on your vista PC, and he told u to restart, but my question is why did you call for that, it seems pointless since u go to dell put in your service tag and it gives u links for the drivers. Also alot of the time companies arent going to haver their tech support tell u how to put an older OS on the machine they'll just say it's not compatible, but just search google and you'll be fine. Why would you want XP any way it's old, Vista is way better now then when it first came out.

Hawk

 

Apple