[BC] Poor customer support

[Sid Schweiger]

Dana Puopolo inquires:  "So how would you rate the service I got from them?"

Much less than it should have been, per my previous posting about all too often having to threaten to withdraw one's business before the right thing is done.

I've noticed, however, that every time I have to call HP professional-grade tech support (so far, not that often), once the CS rep and I finish our initial discussion and have agreed on a course of action, the CS rep goes away for a few minutes, and I'd bet anything he's double-checking with his supervisor.  I've never had a supervisor overrule the CS rep, and if I had to draw a conclusion from that I'd guess that the CS people are well-trained enough to know what they're doing and not give away the store unless it's necessary.

Mark Croom chimes in:  "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."

Same with us.  I have some Compaq Evo D310s, now upwards of seven years old, still working like new.  We have generally a mixture of D310s, d220s, dx2000s, dx2200s and dx2300s...all business-class desktops...and have had maybe two or three die of old age.  The only infant mortality any of them have suffered was one which came through with a dead case fan, which won't let it boot up (fan movement is monitored by the BIOS and forces a shutdown if the fan isn't moving).  As we rotate the older machines out of service in the sales, programming and promotions areas, we keep a bunch around when we need machines in engineering...and they just keep right on rolling along.

Sid Schweiger
IT Manager, Entercom New England
20 Guest St / 3d Floor
Brighton MA  02135-2040