… because they completely and utterly suck at it.
I was asked to look at a Compaq Presario desktop that’s gone bad. System turns on, but nothing on the monitor. Doing some quick checks and some basic troubleshooting, my first thought is “bad motherboard.” Check the support docs on hp.com, follow directions therein, but no change.
At this point, I decide to get an HP tech support rep on this, because I strongly believe the issue is hardware and that some piece of hardware needs to be replaced. The chat opens quickly (no queues = good), and one of the first things the rep asks me is (paraphrasing here) if I can feel a hard drive spinning sound. As it turns out, I am in fact capable of feeling sounds, seeing music and tasting feelings (or, if you prefer, hearing food. It’s all the same joke, really.)
The tech eventually determines that the issue could be the graphics card, which I agree is a possibility. She then asks if the “system is warranty”. Oh, online chat, how I love you, because I know if I had to speak with this person on the phone, I’d have a hard time doing one or both of the following things:
- understanding whatever accent this person has and/or
- holding in my disgust of this person’s inefficiency of communicating in English when her job is to communicate efficiently in English.
I respond to the script-reader that I don’t know if the system is under warranty as I don’t own the system and I’m only doing support for it. Apparently, I may have set off a red flag, because after 5 minutes of waiting, I get asked if there’s any other issue I have, and after responding “Nope, no other issues.”, I get the standard closing before she abruptly disconnects (which closes the chat window before I can copy and paste the conversation.)
Now, beyond the design flaw of force-closing the chat window without the user’s consent, there are 2 possible issues here. Issue 1 is: “If you don’t know if the system is under warranty, I won’t help you further.” Investigating into this, I found that unlike business accounts, there’s really no way to check the warranty status of a home or home office system online. While it’s annoying, I can at least understand why that’s the case (I’m guessing HP business accounts usually purchase direct from HP, and HP would keep track of the serial numbers of the units and keep track of the warranty info; home user systems would be purchased through a third party (Best Buy, CompUSA, etc.) and the warranty would have to be purchased by the end-user to establish a start-time for the warranty.) So while I can’t fault HP 100% for this issue, the rep gets a thumbs down for not explaining that without confirmation of active warranty, she can’t continue. It’s good to keep customers in the loop.
The second possible issue is “if you’re not the owner of the system, I won’t help you further.” Again, I don’t know if this is the reason due to the lack of information conveyed to me by the rep, but I would imagine tech-to-tech calls are not that uncommon and that it wouldn’t be unheard of for someone other than the system owner to call tech support.
All in all, a sour experience with a HP live-chat tech support representative. Moral of the story: DELL RULEZ OMGWTFBBQ.