Annual Customer Support Rankings

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo's Tech Tuesday is running PC Mag's annual survey of best and worst PC vendors' customer support. At the top of the list: Apple. At the bottom: Sony. Heard any good tech support horror stories lately?"

Dell is by far the worst...

[truz24]

Being on the phone with Dell tech support is by far the worst experience ever. They don't have a clue, and it sounds as if they are reading off solutions to a list of problems that sound like the one you might be having. Hopefully they move the damn thing out of India.

happened to me 15 years ago

[fullmetal55]

sent in my Texas Instruments Travelmate 2000 (286-12 1 mb ram 20 meg hdd) for an LCD replacement, came back with a power adapter for a travelmate 3000, completely incompatable with the laptop...

Ha ha Sony

[Enry]

I'll never buy another monitor from them again.

Had a 21" monitor go bad, so I called Sony to get a repair. They said the warranty was 3 years, and the back of the monitor says "Mfg. August 2001" (this was mid-March 2004). So I should be set, yes?

No. That would be easy.

Apparently, Sony's system says that monitor was manufactured in February 2001 and thus is out of warranty. The only way I could prove the age of the monitor was to send in the original paperwork when we purchased it. Knowing my purchasing department, it's hidden in a box somewhere and it would be worth more to buy a new montior than spend the time looking for the paperwork.

Lousy jerks wouldn't even accept a picture of the back of the monitor clearly showing the serial number and manufacture date.

Re:Dell is by far the worst...

[Anonymous Coward]

Props to the parent. I have never met a Dell customer who was satisfied with their support. They are so good at reneging on a contract they should go into insurance sales. Incidentally, my dad just killed his Dell with a glass of wine. They wouldn't uphold thier support contract, so he got a sweet Toshiba P20 widescreen laptop. Thier warranty specifically covers against spill damage, and they actually live up to it :)

Re:Dell is by far the worst...

[ir8monkey]

I dunno, dvdrom died in my inspiron 1100, I had a new one at my door within 48 hours, no complaints there, provided packing slip to send the old one back and everything. happy as a clam :P

Result tables

[brejc8]

Here are the tables of results for notebooks [ziffdavisinternet.com] and desktops [ziffdavisinternet.com]

Sony support sucks

[Lxy]

Our company purchased a nice supply of Sony Microvault USB keychain drives. For whatever reason, these drives just stop working. If you unplug a drive without properly dismounting it, it will fail to be recognized under any OS as a drive. Windows reports it as a "security device". There is no way to recover the data, the drive is shot. Further testing showed that even if you dismount it properly, there's a good chance of corrupting the drive.

Call up Sony tech support, you'll get bounced around to several support numbers (some long distance, some toll free). Most of the time you get directed back to the number you previously dialed, and your issue is never resolved.

This is a documented problem, and on the occasion that you're able to get the correct tech support staff Sony will refuse to fix it. There is a lengthy process to fix the drive, but it's a pain and your data is unrecoverable. Sony has since stopped making the Microvaults, but it's a good example of how bad their support really is.

Re:Best, but not perfect, obviously

[grommitfry]

Apple's Phone support for consumer products is OK. They have their scripts they have to follow and having supported 150 laptops in a corp. environment I had to wrestle with them on more than one occasion trying to convince the schmo on the other end that I could NOT click on the such-and-such because my LCD really WAS dead. . . That said, their Xserve support is outstanding. I have owned 2 Xserves and an Xserve RAID and have gotten more than my money's worth with the AppleCare contracts from those high-end boxes. The techs TRUST you have done your due dilligence, that you are not a moron and know what they are talking about. They are not outsourced script-reading tech-support-monkeys and am I truly indebted to them for assistance on several occasions. It's nice to have "peers" answer the calls who know and use your same products, who understand you have a SERVER which can't just be restarted randomly in the middle of the day willy-nilly and actually resolve your issues post-haste. Thanks Apple.

No kidding - Horror story

[totoanihilation]

My dad, who has a full service contract on his latitude D800 laptop (i.e. they come to his workplace to fix it) was asked to take his laptop apart and pull the modem adapter out, and try to place it back in when it would fail to connect. When he told them he didn't have the screwdriver (nor the expertise) to do any of that, he was told to go buy an appropriate screwdriver, and call them back so they would guide him.

Needless to say, I told him to call back, b1tch and complain and actually send a guy in to fix his laptop as per the service contract.

Turns out it was windoze XP that was screwing up. Now what would've happened if he'd fried his laptop with static electricity while trying to do the operation? Would they've fixed it? Provided him with a replacement, AND a backup of ALL his work-related data?

RTFA?

[tbjw]

The people who post no longer seem to read the articles. The article itself isn't just about which company has the best tech support, it's also about whose computers are more reliable.

IBM, not Apple, have the best support, but by contrast they have poor overall reliability. Apple hardware is susceptible to the fewest failures of the hardware vendors reviewed, which is why they are top of the list.

Re:Best, but not perfect, obviously

[jcostantino]

Apple power adaptors have been less than reliable due to design flaws. What model iBook (white or colored) and what model power adaptor (brick or yo-yo) was it? The yo-yo style was prone to fray at the base and the other end at the power connector. The brick was also prone to failure at each end.

If you had a "duck head" (that's what they call it, no joke) you probably had a white brick. They upgraded the older 45w bricks to 65w - mostly for the 17" Powerbook's additional draw, the power connectors should still fit without a problem. The only obvious difference between 45 and 65 watt units is the switch from a plastic post to a metal post where the power plug goes.

By the way, Apple's power adaptors suck :) Buy a nice aftermarket one for $70 when your warranty expires instead of their failure prone garbage for $130ish.

Apple's Depot repair service seems to only hire idiot jackasses to do the repairs. I've gotten back some things worse than when they were sent in! The turnaround time is usually excellent but you have to do some hand-holding to make sure they get it right. They usually forget to replace PRAM batteries on older units when it's obvious they have failed.

Re:What about non-official channels?

[abb3w]

It'd be interesting to know how the unofficial support channels stack up against the real thing

Suggestive, from the article:

It's worth noting that the highest-ranked vendors both for reliability and tech support, bar none (emphasis added), are the do-it-yourselfers and the "white box" companies no-names sold by local integrators.

Impressive, given that "bar none" evidently includes Apple-- whose satisfaction levels were about 1 full point out of 10 above everyone else's.

They are all files!

[SuperKendall]

The response may have not been exactly helpful, but it was correct...

The great thing abotu Backup is that it just dumps files right onto the CD or DVD! If you mount it you can see the files right there and copy them to your hearts content. At least, I was able to get stuff off them that way.

That's what they meant I think, in that they don't "compress" the file in some wierd way like OTHER backup programs. They make sure you can get to the data without the program.

iPhoto is simialr in that underneath, it's just storing your original photos in directories, so if iPhoto ever stopped working or you had backed up an iPhoto library to disc you can just get out the JPG files.

Re:IBM Thinkpads...

[MrNiceguy_KS]

I've gotta plug IBM too. The bank where I work IT is an all-IBM shop. I call IBM -- I talk to a real live person in less than 2 minutes (counting the "Press 1 for hardware support")

Then, that real live person assumes I'm not an idiot! I tell them "The hard drive is dead. It made unhealthy-sounding noises and now it doesn't show up in BIOS." They say "Okay, we'll send you a replacement hard drive. It should be there in 2-5 business days."

Then, the part shows up the next day. I have literally called at 3:30 PM and had the part arrive the next day. I switch the parts, box up the old one, and send it back. I've got nothing but good things to say about IBM.

The actual survey

[shaitand]

I would have thought we'd see a link to actual survey instead of a story about the story about the survey ;)

Here is the results page [pcmag.com]

Here is the start of the survey story [pcmag.com]

Re:Dell is by far the worst...

[Aadain2001]

Last I looked the Dell contracts specificly say they DON'T cover spill damage since that would be a user induced error. I had a Dell laptop that had it's screen slowly tint more and more purple over a period of 3 days. When I called up Dell I did get a guy who didn't speak english very well, but being an engineer I'm used to this situation. After explaining the problem he schedualed a pickup of my laptop by Airborn express (or whatever it is called). They picked it up the next day (Thursday) and I had it back in my hands early Monday morning. It still works (bought it in 1998)!!!! They were quick, it didn't cost me a thing, and they were very polite to me during the call and never accused me of doing anything to my laptop to cause the problem. So, you had said you had never met a happy Dell support customer. You just did :-P

How many people here call tech support 1st?

[TykeClone]

Calling tech support sucks and it's far easier to find answers to most problems on the web (either on google or on the vendor's site).

The only time that I call those places is when I need to have a part replaced. And it usually sucks - you have to convince those on the other end of the line that you really do, in fact, know what you're doing and that you really do believe that the problem will be resolved by replacing the dead hard drive.P? I once had a fairly new Dell Dimension die. After looking at it I just reinstalled the OS on a new hard drive - problem solved. I called tech support to replace the hard drive and told them that was the problem. They started asking if I'd jumped through their hoops - I just said that the machine is working perfectly one a spare drive and that was the problem. I got the new hard drive.

Re:Earthlink tech support

[UTPinky]

I told them I was using a Touring Machine

a Turing machine maybe?

Re:Best, but not perfect, obviously

[ack154]

Under warranty, Apple pays shipment both ways - express FedEx. They also provide the (very secure) packaging, which was at least safe in my opinion. You can even follow the status of it like a RMA type deal, where it will say when they received it and where it's currently at. I was quite pleased with the rest of the process.

Great. I Just Bought a Sony...

[ewhac]

Barely less than a week ago, I bought a Sony Vaio VGN-S150 [sonystyle.com] laptop, to replace an old HP Omnibook subnotebook running Linux. I wanted something that was small-ish but had more than 1024*768 pixels on the panel. The VGN-S150 is a "mid-size" laptop, with a panel resolution of 1280*800 and absolutely amazing brightness and clarity.

I was aware that Sony had a poor reputation for reliability and suport when I bought it. However, since I don't tend to abuse my machines, I don't anticipate needing to deal with Sony. If the machine craps out, it will be because the machine is legitimately a lemon, and that fact should be revealed within the one-year warranty period.

I'm finding, much to my delight, that the VGN-S150 is turning out to be a rather fine Linux laptop. The ATI graphics drivers, both XFree86 and radeonfb, can drive the odd panel resolution directly without complaint, so I get to use all the pixels. The internal 802.11g card, with the Intel 2200BG driver [sourceforge.net], appears to work fine (although Kismet isn't talking to it). I have yet to get sound working, and I'm still trying to get ACPI standby/suspend to work. Elsewise, it's just lovely. Once I get Linux fully working, I'll do a write-up for the TuxMobil pages.

Schwab