Tech Support: The Good, Bad & Ugly
By Richard Sherwin
Vizio and Microsoft score high marks on this consumer tech support report card. Apple, AT&T and LG do not fare as well.
Over the last few months, my friends, my family and I all had some tech support issues… with a combo HD-DVD/Blu-ray Player from LG; a camcorder from Hitachi; a Vizio TV, a Media Center Desktop PC from Dell and HP (using Vista Service Pack 1); a switchover from Cable to DSL and back to Cable a whole house Wi-Fi audio system and an Apple iPhone.
Which do you think got fixed first, what was last? Wrong! Keep guessing.
Since hardly anything in this high tech age works perfectly from the get go, it is sometimes the manufacturer’s or service provider’s customer/tech support that makes the difference between a happy, repeat customer and a pull-out-the-hair, I- will-always-hate-this- company experience. And, unfortunately, thanks to all the new features, even usually reliable TV makers have added, the learning curve or usability experience is also going downhill fast.
If you throw in the fact that many products now have to partially rely on the Internet or cable and telephone companies, well, you do the math. The odds on getting good service from almost any service provider is not good. If you look at some recent industry statistics, a few of the of the most notorious offenders in the “we don’t care about you” product categories are… Microsoft - in all aspects of computing and Vizio - in TVs.
But surprise-surprise friends, neighbors and family recently had great experiences with the customer and tech support groups at Vizio and Microsoft. Both companies (on an image improvement campaign) were quick to answer the phone and unbelievably quick to solve a problem or two and to act on the issues with the least amount of hoops to jump through. And they were the leaders during our recent excursion into customer and tech support hell.
My neighbors 60-inch Vizio Plasma TV purchased at BJs wholesale club wouldn’t work at all except for an occasional blurry screen. My neighbor called the phone number on the install booklet and Vizio sent out a repair person in one day. He diagnosed the problem and offered either an on-site repair which might take a few hours or a replacement TV. My neighbor chose a replacement and the unit arrived on schedule and was up and running perfectly the next day.
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[Link: electronichouse.com]
