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?"

Re:Best, but not perfect, obviously

[Dr. Evil]

So you're saying that they made a mistake, you raised the issue, and they corrected it.

The horror :-)

What kinda tech support?

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Is it Apple answer the most "how do I check my e-mail" questions, or is it they help you set up a network type of questions?

Any monkey can answer 100 questions on [insert basic function here], but do they just tell customers to "format C to fix it" so they can get through the most?

Your own worst enemy

[Potor]

I find it vaguely disturbing that this man, who would tell us about support and who makes his living with his notebook, would not do automated back-ups.

Although I know that this may not be an absolute statement, so many computer problems are not the fault of the vendor, and those that are, are often made worse by personal computing habits.

It is so simple to do a nightly backup to a ftp server with only a batch file, a text file, and pkzip. I only dare mention this on /. on the off-chance that the article's writer is lurking nearby. It is advice he could use.

cheers, potor

Re:Article hits nail on the head

[southpolesammy]

Apple: "After all, the company's control over both software and hardware helps make its systems more reliable."

Which is why all the bogus claims of Apple's and Sun's pending demise just continue to sound preposterous to me. These companies have ultimate control and ultimate knowledge about their products, have teams that work together to diagnose problems, and consistently achieve customer satisfaction. But this does nothing to stop the trolls that keep barking the same old tired lines.

Other companies could stand to learn a few old tricks from these companies -- customer support is the most important part of a company's existence. Without customers, you are nothing.

Re:Horror Stories?

[hipster_doofus]

<sarcasm>
Oh come on, this color scheme isn't so bad! The designer could've used #FFFFFE text against a #FFFFFF background. Try that out and then come back and tell me this is a crap design!
</sarcasm>

Re:Stupid? How about this one.

[your_mother_sews_soc]

It's a Mac OS 9 looking window, you insensitive clod! Also, the "virus" is an LDEF, a control-like code resource. The machines in the movie look like windows boxes, but most are Macs.

Re:Sony support sucks

[Sun Zu]

Having worked for Sony support I would first like to say that yes, Sony support sucks and deserves to be at the bottom of the list. But please, don't always blame the rep at the end of the line. While I'm sure that more than a fair share of complaints come from incompetance, most of the problems come from your rep's hands being tied.

I have never worked for, or heard of another company that discourages customer service so completely. Everything was about the bottom line. Anything above the appearance of trying to help was(is) unprofitable. Basically, they wanted us to sit on the lines and answer the phones (for the illusion of trying to be helpful,) then get that customer off and answer the next call as soon as possible.

One time I had a customer, who was having some driver troubles, reboot their computer while I waited on the line. Quality Control (this call may be monitored...) advised me that next time I sould have the customer hang up at that point and call back when it was finished! For a minute and a half restart time I was expected to make them call back and wait on the line for another hour!

Just a thought for everyone.

Re:Best, but not perfect, obviously

[nordicfrost]

So you're saying that they made a mistake, you raised the issue, and they corrected it.

The horror :-)

So Apple's mistakes are OK, and your sarcasm implies everyone else's are part of a global conspiracy and ineptitude?

Everyone are permitted to make a mistake. But there's a world of difference between making the mistake, getting knowledge about the mistake and rectifying it vs. making the mistake, getting knowledge about it, ignoring it, getting warned again, transfer you to another branch, they insist it's not their field, going back, explain the whole thing again, getting put on hold, "Sir, that serialnumber doesn't exist in our system", not getting transferred to second tier, not being allowed to talk to a manager, blaming everyone else for their own fuck-ups, not logging the complaint so you have to force them to look into the Jara system, having to call the supplier and take up the fight with them too AND getting billed for it. (Also a true story, currently fighting with Tele2 ADSL customer support)