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HP's Customer Dis-Service
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By: Joyce Becknell, Research Director, EMEA, Sageza Group, Inc. (Moved) Published: 22nd January 2007 Copyright Sageza Group, Inc. © 2007 |
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StumbleUponAhhh the joys of owning a PC. I purchased an HP Pavilion 7495 back in October when my laptop motherboard crashed and burned. I'd been putting off buying because I was waiting for an AMD chip to come out but I bit the bullet and bought the system because I was in dire need of a PC and couldn't wait any longer. The day I brought it home, I installed it, and then paranoid little nerd that I am, I went straight to the Microsoft Update site and started downloading critical updates. Things went well for awhile, but then something went very wrong. The pc went into a continuous reboot loop after I'd installed all the updates.
Seeing as there were really no apps installed yet, I did an F10 and started over. Because I was in a hurry, I let it go. Flash forward to January. I did a backup of my system (still paranoid) and thought—well, maybe there was a glitch—I'll try this again. No glitch. The same thing happened. And I couldn't boot in safe mode and any other fixes I tried all told me that the computer was hopelessly corrupt. I did the F10 maneuver again, but this time, I decided I'd get to the root of the problem before I put all my apps back on the system. So I went to the Microsoft site to see if I could get online support, and it told me to contact the PC's manufacturer.
So I called HP in Italy and sat on hold for 4 minutes until the lady came back and told me to call back later because all the lines were busy. Nice. So I went online to HP and got an online techie. Alvin P is what he told me his name was. So I wrote out an explanation of what had happened, and what I had tried. I explained that I needed to know which one of the updates was not getting along with HP's version of XP Media Center Edition 2005 and what I could do to get around it. His response—you have to do each update manually to figure out which one doesn't work. Mind you, there are 63 of them according to Microsoft. Mind you, this has been a problem since October, and you'd think I wouldn't be the only one with this problem, so maybe someone at HP and/or Microsoft had worked it out by then and could tell me. Nope.
So in the end, this is HP's response—go figure it out by yourself. AND THEN WHAT!!!????? So once I know which patch is damning my system—which it will do again—then I'll have to do F10 AGAIN and install all the other patches again and then hope that was the only patch giving me a hard time. However, that only isolates the problem. It doesn't solve it. What do I do about the bad patch? Skip over it and leave my system vulnerable to whatever that patch was supposed to fix? I think what really annoys me most is that Alvin clearly didn't go digging through any databases to see what might have happened previously. Nope he just blew me off with—well, you have to install each one and see what happens!!!
I did warn him that I was an industry analyst and if that was his last and best answer then I was irritated enough to blog. He said I would just have to wade through each patch and figure out for myself what was the problem. Now that's fine if you're a semi-literate person who likes technology. But what about HP's thousands and thousands of customers who aren't particularly literate? What would they do at this point? It makes me think twice about purchasing another HP system.
Reader Comments
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22nd January 2007: 'Andrew' said:
I can empathize with you and your lack of support from HP. I recently had a similar result from HP's online chat support regarding an HP Pavilion desktop system whose motherboard appears to have died.
But frustrating as it is, this is not an issue unique to HP -- it happens every day across the industry. In fact, I challenge you to find a computer company today that you would not receive a similar result.
Fact is, there has been a huge amount of 'brain drain' and turmoil in the support industry as a result of companies off-shoring support to places like India, Costa Rica and China. There continues to be a high level of turnover, and the result is both inexperience and a general lack of care for the customer.
I truly believe that quality support for consumer-level commodity products such as PCs is dead, and issues such as this will be the norm until companies wake up and realize any short-term gain to the bottomline is offset by their long-term loss of consumer customer base.
Myself, I have no future plans to buy another 'branded' PC and be pigeon-holed into using their proprietary parts and/or (non)support of the product, which is what happened to me and my Pavilion. I will build my own instead.
22nd January 2007: 'David Sudweeks' said:
Joyce,
I'm with you in the sense that I would most likely never consider purchasing anything from HP's consumer line—especially not a computer. But their commercial line; I've had nothing but success with it. When something breaks, there's a simple web form to fill out. No phone time. Someone very competent responds within a couple of hours. If it's a tricky repair, they send a shipper and arrange for pickup. Everything comes back fixed in a week. Or for something you can handle on your own, like swapping out a bad hard drive, they ship you the replacement and you send the bad one back. It's true that HP doesn't spend much on support for their consumer line computers; but that's 1) not uncommon among HP's peers, and 2) to be expected considering what you're paying for the machine. They had to cut their costs somewhere.
It's a normal tendency to base our opinions on very little information. As opposed to its consumer side, HP's commercial side works like it's a whole different company. Given my experience with them, I wouldn't go with anybody else.
24th February 2007: 'Cigar Dan' said:
I will be found dead before I ever buy another HP product! $500 stuck in an HP 2710 that is 1 year old and all customer service offers AFTER 3 HOURS on hold is to sell me a new unit....over my dead body! May this company continue on its road to Bankruptcy!
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