Top 3 companies with worst tech support? Dell, HP and Acer

[General Zod]

Somehow not in the least bit surprising.

“Your call is important to us. Please hold.”

If your eyes just rolled toward the back of your head, you’re not alone. Just check out the tsunami of customer complaints about poor technical support at ConsumerAffairs.com. And, you’ll probably want to do this before—not after—you purchase your next notebook.

Last year, more notebooks were sold in the U.S. than desktop PCs, according to the research giant IDC. This year, make that more notebooks than desktops sold worldwide. No doubt this is partly a result of cut-throat price reductions, and the overwhelming popularity of low-cost netbooks. The implications of this phenomenon on technical support are simple: The more notebooks out there, the greater the demand for tech support services. And PC makers are finding that customers of inexpensive notebooks are expecting the same quality tech support as high-end customers. But, given the economies of scale, and the economy itself, something has to give.

Virtually no computer vendor—or retailer, for that matter—is immune from the wrath of users who have become intimately familiar with the Blue Screen of Death, and other PC foibles. But, it’s how manufacturers handle their customers’ hardware and software problems that ultimately determine their true reliability, and, you would think, future sales.

Try telling that to Dell or Hewlett-Packard. When Forrester Research asked nearly 4,600 consumers about their interactions with a variety of companies, PC manufacturers—with one exception—averaged poor to just barely okay. In its April 2009 report, Forrester calculated its customer experience index, based on the “usefulness, usability and enjoyability of their experiences.” With a score of 65 percent or less considered poor, Dell ranked lowest in consumer satisfaction with 58 percent. HP and its associated brand Compaq also received poor rankings of 64 and 63 percent, respectively. Gateway squeaked by at 66 percent. Apple was the lone vendor with a good 80 percent satisfaction rating.

Further corroborating this trend, more than 4,500 laptop owners who read Consumer Reports also held court regarding tech support. Apple claimed a gratifying reader score of 83 percent, with Dell at 60, and HP at 48. It is no coincidence that the sellers of the most laptops have the lowest marks for technical support—but that’s no excuse, either.

Last year, LAPTOP’s annual undercover review of technical support services saw remarkable overall improvement in Web and phone tech support. This year, we found a general decrease in service quality, with the lowest ratings going to, yes—you guessed it, Dell and HP; and the highest marks going to Apple (which also makes the most expensive notebooks). In addition to Dell, HP, and Apple, we checked in with seven other major PC vendors to evaluate (See “How We Tested”) their technical support prowess. Read on to learn how they fared.

The full article includes methodology, but I thought this was kind of interesting and pretty much backs up the majority of viewpoints on each company that I always wind up hearing. Interestingly enough Apple had the top rated support line.

[Darth Wong]

Have you seen how cheap these guys try to sell their notebooks? I can buy a Dell Inspiron notebook from dell.ca with a 15.6" screen for $469 CDN, complete with OS. When you buy budget hardware, you get budget service. Nothing surprising or scandalous here.

[Starglider]

Automated tech support is now a 'hot' initial application area for companies trying to make artificial general intelligence. At least one company I know that claims to have almost completed one (Adaptive AI Inc) is focusing on this application as their initial money earner, and several other people are talking about it - we seriously considered it before deciding we wanted to stay away from natural language comprehension for a while. Areas like machine translation have been filled by 'good enough' solutions based on brute-force statistical methods, while things like robot navigation are finally being solved now by non-general methods. There is however a huge demand for a 'chatbot that can replicate a first line tech support call center drone', both for cutting costs and for improving the accuracy of answers - and getting that to work requires technology beyond the commonly available state of the art. Frankly considering how useless the first-line people tend to be (they're the ones who read from an on-screen script with zero understanding of the subject matter, and something like a six month staff turnover rate) I will be happy when this technology is deployed.

[Mr Bean]

Have you seen how cheap these guys try to sell their notebooks? I can buy a Dell Inspiron notebook from dell.ca with a 15.6" screen for $469 CDN, complete with OS. When you buy budget hardware, you get budget service. Nothing surprising or scandalous here.

Except DW if you buy a 3,000 business laptop from them you get the same level of service as the $500 laptop you were speaking of, so that does not exactly follow. Dell does not sort you based on what computer you bought, just on if your a home, business or corporate customer calling. Same thing with HP. I can't speak for Apple because I've never pulled call center for them or work them with.

[Uraniun235]

Frankly considering how useless the first-line people tend to be (they're the ones who read from an on-screen script with zero understanding of the subject matter, and something like a six month staff turnover rate) I will be happy when this technology is deployed.

I don't understand why they don't just make a flowchart based off of the same script that the phone staff uses, and then stick the flowchart on the support website. I suppose you could run into issues where people lie about having tried the flowchart, but you might also cut the number of calls in total.

[Starglider]

I don't understand why they don't just make a flowchart based off of the same script that the phone staff uses, and then stick the flowchart on the support website.

That's been tried, but it doesn't work very well, because a large fraction of callers are too lazy to read a flowchart, too stupid, or both. Also flowcharts don't scale well to large numbers of possible problems, because the number of multi-choice questions you have to step through to diagnose a completely general computer problem is too many for the attention span of typical lusers. Finally there's the problem that many home users only have one computer, and if it's broken they can't get on the tech support site - and putting such a flowchart into a multi-choice phone menu system would be pretty tortous. An AI based system that can use a general plain-English description to skip 10 or so steps of multi-choice question, and correctly diagnose say the most common 80% of problems without needing a human, would be very valuable.

[Vendetta]

Have you seen how cheap these guys try to sell their notebooks? I can buy a Dell Inspiron notebook from dell.ca with a 15.6" screen for $469 CDN, complete with OS. When you buy budget hardware, you get budget service. Nothing surprising or scandalous here.

They've started giving them away with 3G data contracts here.

[Vendetta]

and putting such a flowchart into a multi-choice phone menu system would be pretty tortous.

That wouldn't be even slightly effective, it would just waste time and annoy people. The average person calling for support does not know the answer to any of your diagnostic questions, the only way to find out is to interactively try things and find out the answer for yourself.

And, of course, there is not a person dead, alive, or yet to be born who does not despise IVRs in all their myriad forms.

[Lonestar]

They've started giving them away with 3G data contracts here.

They do that here too, although in that case it's for netbooks(cue Stark) rather than "standard size" notebooks. The adverts semed to be geared towards idiots who think that "wireless netbooks=internet anywhere!" without mentioning the contract needed for the dongle that touches the cell phone network.

[Vendetta]

They've started giving them away with 3G data contracts here.

They do that here too, although in that case it's for netbooks(cue Stark) rather than "standard size" notebooks. The adverts semed to be geared towards idiots who think that "wireless netbooks=internet anywhere!" without mentioning the contract needed for the dongle that touches the cell phone network.

Yeah, same here. Though thanks to the prevelance of the old GPRS network and the population density of most of the UK you pretty much do get internet anywhere. It's just slow as shit.

[phongn]

I've actually had reasonably good support with Dell Business (and terrible support with their home line).

[Slacker]

I've actually had fantastic service from HP for my laptop. Guess it's luck of the draw.

*edit*
Actually, now that I think about it I was able to bypass stage 1 really quickly by telling them I'd done all the things on their script and I knew it wasn't a stage 1 problem-the DC plug on my mobo burned out and they had to replace it. I got to the stage 2 guys in about three minutes and five minutes after that they were giving me an order number to depot it, so I guess it's a bit of knowing what you're dealing with too.

[General Zod]

I've actually had fantastic service from HP for my laptop. Guess it's luck of the draw.

*edit*
Actually, now that I think about it I was able to bypass stage 1 really quickly by telling them I'd done all the things on their script and I knew it wasn't a stage 1 problem-the DC plug on my mobo burned out and they had to replace it. I got to the stage 2 guys in about three minutes and five minutes after that they were giving me an order number to depot it, so I guess it's a bit of knowing what you're dealing with too.

The one time I had to use HP support their first level was horribly lackluster and not so bright. I had to deal with them via email and didn't think there would be many issues, but it seemed like they didn't understand English very well, which made communicating the problem difficult. Shipping the laptop off and receiving it back was a breeze when I finally got to that point but I have no desire to use HP's support again.

[Slacker]

The one time I had to use HP support their first level was horribly lackluster and not so bright. I had to deal with them via email and didn't think there would be many issues, but it seemed like they didn't understand English very well, which made communicating the problem difficult. Shipping the laptop off and receiving it back was a breeze when I finally got to that point but I have no desire to use HP's support again.

The people I dealt with, stage 1 and 2, definitely weren't native English speakers. That said, they both seemed fairly fluent, the stage 2 guy unsurprisingly a bit better than the initial person. Unfortunately the reality is nowadays is that none of a company's support operations are based in the US or Europe.

[RThurmont]

The best support I've actually seen was from Sun Microsystems. On the one occasion where I had a minor oddity with one of my Ultra 24 desktops (specifically with the mobo alarm sequence being triggered anomalously), they connected me directly with a technician who was highly experienced with the Ultra 24 system architecture. We concluded my KVM switch was fooling the system into thinking it was experiencing a USB error (I use Airlink KVM switches which can be really weird), thus causing a coded alert beep sequence. Not a huge deal.

I've never had a problem with Apple Support not properly addressing something, however, I bitterly resent the fact that for iPhone support, you are required to take it in to a Genius Bar (as opposed to their being full-featured phone support).

[JointStrikeFighter]

I've never had a problem with Apple Support not properly addressing something, however, I bitterly resent the fact that for iPhone support, you are required to take it in to a Genius Bar (as opposed to their being full-featured phone support).

You have to make an appointment 72 hours in advance too. Don't get Stark started on that one; he drove nearly an hour to a genius bar only to find out about the appointment thing.

[Wicked Pilot]

I don't even waste my time on tech support. If it's fucked up I fix it, even if I have to pull all nighters to figure it out. Of course of my last three desktops two I built myself, so take that for what's it worth.

[RThurmont]

You might find that a bit harder if you're talking about a laptop, or, for example, an enterprise IT system (switch/router/server).

Actually, with most high end enterprise hardware, tech support is fully automated. If you have, for example, a midrange SAN, if one of its redundant controllers detects a hardware support, it will e-mail your vendor, and they'll send out a guy who will change it out.

With IBM mainframes and othe rreally high end systems, they take it a step further and provide SLAs. If your system goes down, you are compensated.

-wgw

[White Haven]

The really irritating thing is that Acer support used to be A) US-based, and B) had no automated garbage to slog through. About a year or so ago they switch to Yet Another Useless Automated Filter and Indian tech support. Amusingly enough, they did it around the same time as Netgear switched back to US support on account of Indian call centers not being able to take their underwear off of their heads long enough to be helpful.

The real fun part? If you're calling Acer up in regards to an RMA, you still have to give them the serial number of the whatever-it-is you're sending it in. That's fine unless you've already shipped it off and as such the people you're calling are the people with the tag you need to get the SN from. I spent a good twenty minutes here at work guessing serial numbers until I found a valid one so that their worthless automated bullshit would let me through to ask a rep where the hell my customer's monitor was.

[Jaepheth]

Except DW if you buy a 3,000 business laptop from them you get the same level of service as the $500 laptop you were speaking of, so that does not exactly follow. Dell does not sort you based on what computer you bought, just on if your a home, business or corporate customer calling. Same thing with HP. I can't speak for Apple because I've never pulled call center for them or work them with.

I used to work at a place that almost exclusively went through Dell. If I remember correctly, their "A game" customer support is sold separately. For example, if we needed a component replaced, Dell would put it on a truck and have it delivered to us in 4 hours.