Whenever something goes wrong with a piece of technology and I reach the utter depths of despair – after I’ve read the manual, looked at the helpful, searched the internet and generally tinkered like a bloke – I sometimes call technical support.
I do this without any hope, of course. See earlier posts about my lamentable experience with McAfee and the City of Westminster, for example. What usually happens is that you get a 17-year old reading a script (“Is the computer switched on?” etc.).
What a difference, then, with HP. My print quality was getting worse and I tried all the usual remedies: new ink cartridges, cleaning print heads etc.) Nothing helped so I called HP. I got through straight away. Their support guy talked me through a few tests and options that I hadn’t tried and then said that I probably needed to change one of the print heads. So far, so good.
I didn’t have a spare print head so I had to go and buy one. What was really impressive was that the technician called me every day to see if it had arrived and if the problem was fixed. What was even more impressive was the call I got this morning from an independent ‘verification department’ to check that the problem really was fixed and to see if I had any suggestions about how to improve HP’s technical support.
I think this must be the first time in history that someone from a call centre said that they would call back and then actually did call back. Kudos to HP.
(Full disclosure: HP is a client, although I don’t do any work for the printer people and their technical support department doesn’t know me from Adam.)
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Glad to hear your printer issue got fixed. Now if only T-Mobile stepped up their tech support…
HP must be the go-to place for tech support these days, as I had equally as excellent service on my (lifetime warrantied) HP ProCurve network switch that I just wrote about HP’s customer support two days ago! I had to call Dell yesterday. They got the job done, but it was a lot more effort and a bit of frustration, although less than is usual for Dell. Go HP!
Verizon needs to take a page from their book. So does Time Warner Cable. (I use Vonage for no other reason than I don’t have to deal with Verizon.)
It’s good to know SOMEONE is doing it right!
I am glad to learn of another highly satisfied HP customer. Non better than HP
They have had this first class service in practice for at least ten years of my experience but the worst are Orange, Dell and E-Bay sellers
Cingratulations to HP First Class service and Products.
I wanted to mention that I have had very bad experiences with HP technical support. It is a RARE experience when I am able to speak to someone who really knows how the equipment works and how to troubleshoot it in a proper way. This is concerning their laptops and printers.
Another problem is talking to someone in India who you can perhaps barely hear and English is not their native language.
Since I have a background in electronics and have done troubleshooting myself on somewhat complex equipment, it can be quite apparent when the support person is lacking in knowledge and troubleshooting skills.
Since I have escalated issues to Case Managers and even sometimes get “blown off” by them, I suggest that HP is not the manufacturer to buy equipment from.
Wayne has had a real problem with HP. I guess one sample, either good or bad, doesn’t make good science. One small point that’s worth making, though, is the whole thing about overseas call centres. Personally, I have no problem with this. If wage rate arbitrage means that companies can provide more support for the same money or the ability to provide follow-the-sun support means that companies want to put call centres overseas, that’s fine by me. Personally, I don’t find Indian accents and idiom difficult.
I have found UK HP support very mixed. The email support has been very good (USA I think) and they seemed to go the extra mile and helped me install a non-supported OS (win2003) on my laptop which I use for my work (Web design) even though they didn’t have to. The UK phone support was the exact opposite (offshored to India I think). Three times they lost my call over 2 weeks (even with service numbers), three times they arranged to pick up my laptop and twice didn’t turn up and had no record so I wasted two days A/L waiting for them. Phone calls were never returned and once I got put through to Logistics (why?). That said when they finall did collect the machine it came back in the 4 days they said and is working fine. The machine itself though has been pretty good (the fault I sent the machine off for being a bunch of white pixels which intermittently got stuck – which happen on all machines and to be fair a lot of other manufacturers won’t replace)
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