Customer Service Scorecard

I've made a bunch of customer service calls in the recent past and thought it would be good to report on them. I had read in a tweet not too long ago from @comcastcares that he thought our current economic troubles would result in improved customer service (I'm paraphrasing), and wondered how my experiences measured up.

HP - I called them because the computer I got from them was cheaper at a local store. It took three people (two calls and one chat), but I got someone who was helpful and offered me $100 credit (close enough to the $130 price difference to call it a wash). A- (it did take three attempts after all, though the final guy I talk to gets an A+ of his own)

American Express - This is a bit embarassing. I inadvertently paid the wrong Amex bill (yeah, I have two cards). One phone call was all it took - the guy who answered the phone understood what had happened and happily moved the money from one account to the other, and assured me there won't be any finance charges. A+

Cisco Small Business Support - Yes, I'm a small business. Or, rather, I buy the same networking hardware that a small business owner would buy. In this case, I had a Linksys SD2008 Gigabit switch that died (computers connected at 10Mb/s rather than 1Gb/s). I called the small business support number, and in less than 5 minutes, the RMA process was kicked off and I had received the emailed instructions. A+ -- but I'm going to have to knock you down a grade just because you sold me this switch which one out of every two reviewers on Amazon has had problems with. B+

Cisco Consumer Support (aka Linksys) - I buy consumer hardware too. In this case, it was an EG008W Gigabit switch. This one died a few months ago, but I didn't think to call to get it replaced. The Small Business Support guy couldn't help me, but he transfered me to a guy who should have been able to. I say "should have" because the conversation didn't go so well. There were communication issues, I said something about my computer connecting at 10Mb/s instead of 1Gb/s, he asked how I knew my computer was connecting at 11Mb/s (yes, he said "11"). The call ended when he put me on hold to "look something up" and then came back and started saying "can you here me? I can't hear you. Are you still there?" and so on until he hung up. I'm sure he heard me fine and was just covering his ass - "yes boss, something happened to the connection." F -- this isn't a surprise, is it?

Frys - everyone's favorite consumer electronics store. I stopped by this evening to get a Netgear switch (GS608) to replace one of the Linksys switches. I happened to see the Norton Internet 2009/Ghost package that I bought for $99 a few weeks ago on sale for $69. With no receipt, I walked up to the return counter, explained things, and was given a store credit of $30 (which I proceeded to spend on the Netgear switch :) A+ -- that's a first for Frys, huh?

Sadly, that only averages out to a C, but that's Linksys bringing the score down. Without them, the average is an A, so I'd say things are looking up. I'm looking to you, Linksys, to get your act together - quality products, competent support. Work on it. It's really not that hard to do.

HP Computer/Customer Service

I finally broke down and bought a new computer the other day. Our old HP desktop (m1050e) died back in December - first the disk went, and then the power supply, since it was 4 years old and mostly too slow to do anything, I didn't bother trying to fix it, I just decided to wait til something new and exciting came out and buy that.

So we waited. And waited and waited. Then finally, two weeks ago, HP listed a new machine - an m9660f on their site. It looked pretty nice, 8GB of RAM, 750GB of disk, AMD Phenom II-940 processor, etc. It was everything I needed, apart from lots of spare drive bays (one internal 3.5", one external 5.25"), and it came with Vista (64-bit) - ok, so it wasn't quite perfect. So I ordered it..

It arrived, yippee!! The box was all sorts of abused, the styrofoam packing material wast smashed all over the place (shame on you HP, using styrofoam, get with the program). And I spent the rest of the week installing things on it - iTunes, a new copy of Outlook (so I can sync my phone's contacts), Norton Ghost (so I can back up the boot partition - WTF Microsoft, would it have killed you to include this in Vista Home Premium?), and so on.

And then it happened. Friday I was flipping through the Frys ads in the Mercury News and there was my new computer, for $130 less than I had just paid 10 days earlier to HP. Crap. $130 will buy lots of accessories, so I called HP to ask for a price match. The computer came with a 21 day guarantee, so I was pretty sure I could say "fine, if you don't want to match Frys' price, I'd like to return the computer" (they cover return shipping too).

My first call to 1-800-BUY-MYHP was answered by "Jessica" (her real name, or so she told me). She assured me that they would match the price of any online retailer. Unfortunately, Frys' price online was different than the one in the paper. Amazon to the rescue - they were around $100 less than what I had paid hp.com. Jessica put me on hold to verify things, and then never came back. I sat on hold for over an hour, waiting, hoping for Jessica to come back. She never did.

Towards the end of my time with Jessica's music on hold, I tried online chatting, with "Sally." I wish I had gotten further with her, but I didn't. She told me they had no price matching policy, but said that I could fax the information (order number, copy of ad, etc) to them and someone would think about what they wanted to do. I somehow imagined this would take longer than the 11 days I had left to return the PC for free, so instead of doing so, I called the 800-BUY-MYHP again.

Thankfully someone other than Jessica answered. This guy read all of the information and then suggested that he could either give me $100 credit on the spot, or I could follow up and fax in all of the other crap and pray (he didn't mention prayer, that's my doing). Of course, I took the $100 credit - it was far easier than finding a fax machine, etc.

After the call, I took a survey which asked questions mainly about "this call" - not the others, but just this most recent one. That sucked. I had had three interactions, Jessica, Sally, and the unnamed guy. Of them, only the unnamed guy actually cared enough to solve my (ok, self-inflicted) problem. Jess and Sally didn't care. Sally just quoted company policy, and Jess, well, she's apparently not mastered the telephone system, so it's not clear where her competence lies.

Anyway, HP, if you're listening, roughly 66.7% of the people handling consumer post-sales issues aren't so consumer-friendly. You might want to look into that. And give the guy who took ownership of my problem some sort of bonus - he was really great.