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.