[BC] Poor customer support

[Mark Croom]

When I stopped buying the "American Made" house brand sold by Global and Tiger, and began buying HP business desktops for my radio stations, the number of computer hardware problems I had went down dramatically. One round of machines purchased in 2003 is still going strong. a half-dozen W4000 2.4GHz P4 workstations all of which are still on the air and/or doing production or logging for us today. I've bought a number of Evo workstations since then, all of which are still in service though the oldest machines are scheduled for replacement just due to age.

Of the latest round of new machines, a small handful of dx7500 and/or 7800 desktops, I have had two hardware failures. One was infant mortality on a hard disk. No problem with the tech support guy other than possibly understanding him. They sent the new drive overnight and I was back in business by noon the next day. That was just over a year ago.

Last week I lost a system board on a machine that had been in service less than two weeks. Same story--tech support worked with me, we did some swapping and I was told the only thing that could cause this problem would be the system board (wish I could have avoided the swapping but hey...he was just trying to improve his chances of getting it right the first time). Got the new board the next business day, installed it, and the fix was even quicker than the hard drive. By the way, this time around I used the live chat option on the website so I didn't even have to try to understand the tech through his accent. Since I type fast and can take a pile of other work with me to do while waiting for replies, I like this option a lot. We did the entire service call through the live chat.

Admittedly I'm not sure I'd want to make that call on a consumer printer or PC though...for fear they would kill a good record they've established in my few calls.

Mark
MN

>> My experience with HP support is exactly the opposite.  They have
>> solved every problem I've thrown at them.  They're trained to listen
>>  and not stick like glue to a pre-programmed list.  They know the
>> products and know what questions to ask.  BTW, these are the
>> professional-level tech support people, not the consumer-grade folks.
>>
>> Sid Schweiger