Here we go again

Warning: This is ultimately a political statement but unpaid.

I will accept contributions, however. I need the money to replace the failed Samsung Galaxy Tab, and to save up for a new desktop.

The Tab was just over 6 months old and the HP Pavilion Desktop is still under the two year warranty and has its second failed hard drive if you do not count the one they first sent with a hard drive that never worked.

Every time I have trouble with my HP I get the MAC users telling me how trouble free their MAC's are. Go away. In the last three months I have had three MAC friends (PC's vs MACS is about as entrenched as Republicans vs. Democrats so I count myself lucky we still talk) that have had failed hard drives. And from what I gather their customer support sucks. HP, the last time this happened, did offer data recovery. Not MAC.

One of my friends with the failed MAC has informed me that 99% of all hard drives be they in a Dell, MAC, HP or tablet or laptop of any of those brands probably come from the same off-shore company. And what incentive do they have for making a dependable product? NONE. It is win/win for them even if we lose. They get to continually make replacement hard drives. And all their people that can speak even a modicum of English get employed in tech support centers.

We have come a long way since my mother's 25 year old Maytag that was still working when Dad bought her a new washer and dryer set. 

So it is not all about American jobs overseas. It is about accountability. Your neighbor working at the assembly plant in Detroit took pride in his role in producing Fords and he did not want to hear us complain about them. But the workers in China do not know us. And if introduced would not even understand what we were screaming. I wonder at times about even the tech support people.

HP does seem to be working on its customer service image. It was once rated one of the worst in the industry. Just a bit better than Dell. I have a friend that told me Dell has gotten better but I have no intention of finding out. But this time from HP I received an e-mail I am able to respond to about the tech problem being experienced. Last year it took me something like 6 days and twice as many phone calls to get my problem escalated (don't you love that word) to someone that might actually own a computer and know that the DVD tray is not a cup holder. It did take me over 30 days to get the computer fixed. And then it didn't work when I got it. Fortunately that time I was able to immediately talk to someone that speaks computer.

So this morning I emailed HP and let them know I think the solution their tech (I do hate using that word for someone speaking from a set list of phrases that constantly has to put you on hold to go ask someone else what to do if that just did not work) came up with is wrong. A recovery disk returning the computer to factory specifications won't work. There are bad sectors on this hard drive. And if I have to go to the problem of restoring all my programs and backing up all my data I want it to work.

I do not want to go back to the incident on the last computer where I insisted it was a hard ware problem and they were adamant it was not. Two days of erasing and recovering and it did not work. Turns out that when they replaced the memory sticks (those had failed in 30 days) they had unplugged the wireless internal modem.

But I do not know that industry today wants anything to work. They make too much money re-selling you a new version of the failed product and promising that major improvements were made. It isn't just that all our money goes overseas it is that it does it again and again and again.

My first computer lasted me over 12 years. I bought a new one because of the internet and a need for more RAM because I changed what I did with it. Since then no computer, except my laptop, has made it past four. It is the manufacturing version of the food industries smaller packages at the same prices. In case you hadn't noticed there is no such thing as a 50 pound bag of dog food any more. And the 25 pound bag is now 17.

I do not think I want to trust my government to a CEO. Their track record with the products I purchase is not that good.

The Rest of the Story

When last I posted I was fighting with HP about a computer that did not work and a customer service department that was from HELL.

I finally received a replacement computer that did boot up and seems to be working. I have not blogged about that success because every time I turn it on I hold my breath. My faith in computers was dashed by the whole experience.

Windows 7 is not as "all inclusive" as Microsoft will have you believe and I still have one HP printer (my favorite) that even with new driver downloads I cannot get recognized. And I fear my monitor is going out. I stayed with the old one so I could get more bang for my buck with the tower. Found a great (not HP) one on sale recently and it is arriving this week. I have not cheered about that because I have lost faith in new products working.

That whole experience with HP Tech support and customer service left such an awful taste in my mouth I don't know if I ever want to call them again.  But in chatting with friends recently I have found that nobody seems happy with product support provided by any major company. I have a few tips following my horrendous 10 day experience:

1) Move all tech support back to United States. English is a complicated language and non-native speakers seldom get it correct enough for highly technical conversations. Or all the cuss phrases a frustrated customer will use. And Asian accents are very difficult for English speakers.

2) Trash all the canned phrases and script! This did not work for Ma Bell before we broke up the telephone monopoly. It just made everyone angry enough to want to break them up. That isn't working very well for us right now. Definitely by the second call a customer ought to be bumped to someone that has the permission of the company to actually dialog - i.e. compose their own responses.

3) Which leads me to the world escalate: ditch it. Yes, I know it is a well used phrase in tech support communities these days but it is also used in wars. So keep that in house because with customers it creates a hostile environment. Tell the customer you are elevating their complaint to the next level. And have it truly be the next level up; not merely the customer support person in the next cubicle. "Hey, Mac, get a load of this broad."

4) Don't put all of us in the same box. One of the reasons I so hate tech centers is I obviously have to begin at the dumb blond lady level. I have been an electrician, I worked with computers when they had only 17K, I know every possible version of re-set on any electronic device I own (though to be honest I still have not been able to setup streaming Netflix through my Samsung Blu Ray/DVD player - who writes these manuals?). By the time I pick up the phone to call the 800 number I know the computer, television, modem, vacuum cleaner, lawn mower, etc. is broken. I want permission to send it back. And not for repair but replacement.

5) Don't put us on hold. Every customer service division supposedly records this call for training, and keeps electronic files on our previous complaints (problems with your product). Get my telephone number, read the file, listen to the tapes, and then call me back with the answer! This is the era of no land lines or minimal land line service. Every single telephone call I made to HP cost me 3 cents a minute. And when the average length of a call is from 20 minutes to 150 I am not doing that on my cell phone with dropped calls and dying batteries. And verifying I am the same customer that called before and that the complaint has not changed routinely takes 2 to 4 minutes of every call.

6) Make it MARCH. Time is money for both of us. And continually hitting F11, F9, F8 while waiting for something different to happen on the screen is not marching. It is giving me carpal tunnel syndrome.

7) Apologize earlier and mean it. When I finally got an e-mail apology from HP I was already to I am never buying another one of your products level. It will, research shows, take me nine years to forget this experience. If I replace a computer on the average of once every three years you have lost out on a minimum of two other sales to me. And then there is the screen I just bought from Amazon, and the replacement printer I am looking to Epsom for.

In closing let me just voice a growing nagging concern  about the quality of the products being manufactured over seas by supposedly American companies.  My mother owned a Whirlpool washer that Dad gave away to a neighbor when it was 20. It still worked. My first cloned PC, with parts made in silicon valley, lasted almost ten years and the laser printer I gave to my ex-husband was still working at 20 years old.

Four years ago I replaced all my twenty year old baseboard electric heaters in my house because, while they still worked, they looked rather banged up. Two of those have already failed. My last Dell computer needed a new mother board at less than a year and I replaced the tower when it was 2. The first monitor with my last HP Pavilion burned out the day after the warranty.

I gave up buying electric drip coffee makers after going through 4 in 6 months. And a few years ago I returned three TV's within the 90 day warranty period because they failed. Does anyone else feel we are doing something very wrong here?