Why I’m never buying HTC again
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HTC customer support asked me to post it to them. I did as I was told and after a few days they respond with a quote of about £120! According to their report, the LCD unit and the microdrive had to be replaced due to user abuse. I was totally disappointed that instead of admitting that it was a faulty device they tried to charge me for no fault of mine.
I paid £20 for return of the device without repairing and reached out to Amazon who refunded me fully without asking a single question. Notice any difference in customer service by these two companies?
As a newcomer to the UK, I've learned I should try to purchase everything with a credit card the hard way. Then you can always use Section 75 of Consumer Credits Act to get reimbursed by your bank in cases where companies refuse to accept their liability. Somehow, customer support seems to be going downhill. Sad days.
All of this makes me want an iPhone as my next device solely for the hardware support.
That was the last good phone they will ever build though, so I'm not going back for more.
LG and HTC are the worst, with the most frequent denial of customer assistance. Samsung and Apple have their faults, but you can typically reach someone helpful when there is an issue.
HTC has some of the worst design decisions I've ever seen. The M8 and M9 each contain approximately 20 pieces of tape on the inside, holding important components together. It takes about 4 hours to replace a screen or charging port, and usually doesn't go back together well.
LG is pretty terrible, as well. Read the horror stories about the G4. The G5 is already exhibiting some of the same flaws, such as half the screen freezing or just showing static, or the device not powering on fully straight out of the box.
Nothing is perfect, and every device has its own faults, but I strongly caution people about dealing with companies like this.
I have one and only had problems with a bad screen protector (that covered the sensor). Despite that, I was going to the G5, just thinking because off the smaller screen.
It's very easy to hack together a web form that always work when taking the happy path. When reality hits you you will notice that you always need some kind of manual override, the dilemma is that this will break automation further down the stream. In one place I worked where we made similar systems we made all forms free text instead of constrained to dates, numbers, addresses etc. The UI would initially constrain the input but you could always enter advanced mode which just made everything into text and marked the whole form as non-machine-processable. It wasn't pretty but in the end it was the only thing that worked in practice. Similarily, editing forms once they are submitted is also commonly overlooked, I've been in contact with many organizations where deleting the order and creating a new is easier then modifying the existing one, as the experience in the article also shows.
Hang up the phone and try your call again. If that doesn't work call the sales number and pretend you're evaluating the unit for possible use with a school full of kids.
This is why you should buy from brands that are known for good warranty: I had an awesome experience with Lenovo for my ThinkPad and terrible experience with Dell (they literally refused to fix my laptop, just a year old, because it was second hand and I didn't have the original buying receipt -- though the laptop still had its service tag and more than a year of warranty).
Next time, buy a Lenovo tablet.
This is why you shouldn't trust anecdotes.
I had the opposite experience. I had a problem with a Dell laptop a few years back and they didn't ask me to ship it back, they sent a tech out with a part to my home! Same week! Nothing beats having the tech fix it and test it and make sure it's working right there.
Lenovo, on the other hand, had 2 week shipping turnarounds and had me waiting for over a month before saying "we can't do anything except put in a new motherboard at your expense", putting me out of a device for 6 total weeks between shipping, waiting and shipping. My local computer repair shop had me fixed in a two day turnaround
I'll never buy Lenovo again, absolutely never.
Edit: maybe it was more like 2008/9. I just remember what job I had then and that it had the expensive extended warranty for 3 or 4 years, and it was about a month and a half from expiring (I looked it up by the service tag).
I will never buy Lenovo again.
I have amazing small/medium business support from Dell on my monitors. If I see a dead pixel, slight backlight fade, or any other issue, I can call Dell and have a new monitor sent overnight to my door.
They can both be affected thereby and able to point out other people shouldn't take their experience as universal at the same time.
Similarly, I've always had a wonderful experience with thinkpads but I don't believe the people who've had bad experiences should necessarily buy another one.
That's just rephrasing my question. I asked why it affects their decision.
You seem to be implying that it is sensible to operate on your own anecdotal experiences as if they carry statistical significance, but that it is not sensible to do the same with other people's anecdotal experiences.
But the reason anecdotal evidence ought not be treated as statistically significant data isn't that the anecdotes may be lies or mistaken memories. The reason is that anecdotal evidence by definition was not gathered systematically and therefore may not represent the entire set of data.
It's been a while, though, since I've had any Inspiron or Latitude devices worked on, so it may not be the case today. I did just buy a new Inspiron gaming laptop, however, on the strength of my positive past experience (and excellent price for a 4k lappy with great GPU). It replaced a consumer HP Envy, which is the single worst computer I think I've ever owned. I hope I don't have to test the warranty service on my new Inspiron.
After they got caught bundling malware twice, I'm never buying Lenovo again.
I would be cautious with that too.
1. http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/19/technology/security/lenovo-s... 2. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/now-three-pre-installed-malware...
I heard that in America there's less warranty by default than in Europe, but isn't 2 years the standard anyway?
In the Netherlands at least, if something breaks unreasonably fast, you can go back even if it has been 10 years. And they can't forward you to the manufacturer or anything: the shop you bought it from has to handle it. Per European law it's 2 years minimum on new electronics (and 1 year second hand) but the Netherlands adds to that.
It was hilarious watching Apple try to convince the government that they weren't a premium brand and therefore didn't have to give longer warranties than a year, while at the same time marketing themselves to the public as a premium brand. The government did the legal equivalent of "cool story, bro" :)
This seems to be an undue burden of uncertainty. I make sprockets and offer 14 months, but my customer sues for 15 and wins a class action settlement. I should have been able to know whether my actions were legal or not, but I'm not sure I realistically could.
IMO in the USA they are the only premium brand in terms of service to consumers.
I'm lucky to live where I do, but I have an Apple retail store just 10 minutes from me and another one 30 minutes away. Apple customer service at those stores is second to none.
There are many horror stories of non-Apple consumer laptops breaking, and it taking weeks for them to be repaired. At Apple they fix laptops in the store in a day or two, depending on whether they have replacement parts in stock.
Same with phones. They will either replace a phone on the spot or take less than a day for repairs such as new batteries or new screens.
They even price match. When new computers have just been announced, and older ones are being sold at low prices by third parties, the Apple store will match those prices. I've gotten 28% discounts from them in those situations.
That's all part of the "premium brand" experience, but you do often pay quite a bit more than comparable hardware from other manufacturers.
The only time I ever went to an Apple Store for support on a laptop it did get get fixed within a couple days, but they also replaced my fully-functional hard drive (with all my data) when the only thing broken was the SATA cable. The conversation I had to have with them to convince me to put my original hard drive back in the laptop was pretty mind-numbing, going through stages of "we don't know where the hard drive is" to "we have it, but we can't give it back to you". I did eventually get the original hard drive back, but that experience kind of soured me to the whole "Apple experience", one of the many factors that eventually led me down the road to learning Linux and basic PC repairs, allowing me to order SATA cables and the like from Amazon and replace them in laptops myself.
I dug up an executive office contact and ended up talking to someone who fixed my last bill in about 10 minutes. While doing so, he volunteered that nobody in the first-level call centers had the authority to actually do what I was asking, including the supervisors, but policy prevented them from saying that. I still remember the sense of surprise I got from how open he was about their horrible customer service being the official policy rather than an aberration.
With high turnover rate and minimal training, most service reps are reading from a script and attempting to appease you into hanging up the phone anyway.
So obviously you can save money by shortening call durations. This has a nice side effect of reducing the number of customers (over time), which also helps reduce support costs.
#metricsDrivenManagement
Or it could be simply a place that doesn't use the call length metric, I imagine every call center has its own set of rules. I can only speak for the ones that my friends work[ed] for. Overseas call centers may have less focus on call length since the cost of the call to the company is less.
EDIT: Forgot to mention the "Uh-oh" protection. They replaced my device (many questions asked, but not super painful) when it fell down and I broke the glass.
I've seen a few people suggest the US support is worse than the EU support, but I've not personally had to deal with HTC support so can't really give any personal anecdotes.
I think it was the billing/shipping mismatch (I travel full-time, so my billing address is a forwarding service in a city I'm unlikely to see again for years, while my shipping address is wherever I'm parked this month). But, their system wouldn't allow changes once the verification had failed. No level of "escalation" could resolve the issue. It was simply a "sorry, no". I guess I am now in a permanent state of "unverified" with T-Mobile, and if I want to buy another phone or activate another line it'll have to be with another provider. I had similar problems with Sprint, which is why I ended up trying to add another line to T-Mobile (I have both, for a variety of reasons, and Sprint would have been a better deal, but their customer support is even worse, if that's imaginable).
It's scary how systems like this can make it impossible to provide a basic level of customer service to someone who doesn't fit the systems exactly. There was a time when customer service reps, or at least their managers, had the ability to override the system when the system prevented a reasonable level of customer service. That doesn't seem to happen anymore, at least in my limited recent experiences dealing with customer service reps at big companies.
Having different billing and shipping addresses is a common tactic in credit card fraud, and it's not common in other cases. I prefer companies who prevent people from shipping to unknown addresses unrelated to the payment method (unless authentication is handled some other way).
Pro-consumer would be to let the consumer pay for his device to be fixed. Pro-consumer would be to not charge them to fix this in the first place.
If you're working full-time, it makes perfect sense.
Your billing address is probably going to be your home address.
But assuming you're working, you wouldn't get packages shipped there - there's nobody at home to sign for them (assuming your spouse/housemate etc. also works), get sent to the local post-office, and you'd have to drive out there during office hours to go pickup your parce. That's a colossal waste of your time.
So often your shipping address is simply your work. I mean, at my current workplace, they've really streamlined it, and they have mail "pods" where you can swipe in, and you have an allocated shelf for each person (well, more a letter range, but yeah, same idea).
Plenty of other companies are able to both honor their agreements and prevent fraud, why can't HTC?
I frankly abhor that you even said so as its this sort of ill thought complacency that allows organizations to continue this behavior.
What they should do is eat the cost of fraud or invent better fraud detection.