Customer service horror story

[Brett_S]

Late last summer I purchased an HP laptop that worked great until recently. I never really paid much attention to how long the battery lasted, but would guess it was at least 8-10 hours, which seemed about right given its light use for word processing, web browsing, and emails. Lately, however, the battery began depleting much more quickly, and now only lasts 2-3 hours on a full charge despite no changes in either the hardware, software, or usage of the laptop. It is still under warranty, however, so I assumed I'd be able to get HP to address this without a major hassle, but as it turns out I was very wrong.

I contacted HP support via chat, and the agent I spoke with told me we'd need to try some diagnostic testing that he estimated would take around 30 minutes. It turned out to be painfully slow, partly because I'd sometimes reply to a question or complete some action for him, only to wait, say 5-10 minutes for him to acknowledge my response. Ultimately what I had been told would take 30 minutes took around THREE HOURS, and I still didn't have a solution. He then said that I'd need to perform a

"battery calibration", which essentially involved fully draining the battery and re-charging it. Knowing that would take a while and being exhausted after three hours of "diagnostic" chatting, I agreed to end that chat and started the battery drain procedure.

Needless to say, that still didn't solve the problem, and when I again contacted HP they now insisted that the next step would be to perform a "Cloud Recovery", which essentially means wiping out the hard drive. I wasn't thrilled with the idea of having to back up and restore my data since I knew the battery draining quickly isn't a software issue, so I pushed back and asked to have a supervisor call me back. One did the following day, and he assured me that if the battery calibration didn't fix the problem that they'd authorize a return for repair. I offered to try the calibration again and said I'd call back and take him up on the offer if it didn't help, but of course it didn't.

Today I again contacted HP support, this time to get them to keep the commitment made to me by the supervisor. However, when I contacted them the agent I talked to on the phone claimed to know nothing about my previous contacts with them (including the supervisor callback) and wanted to start over from the beginning with the diagnostic procedures. Not wanting to waste another three hours I refused, asked to (again) speak to a supervisor, and was told one would call me back. That was in the morning and in the afternoon I hadn't heard from anyone, so I again contacted support (this time via chat) and things got even worse.

The agent that I chatted with, Abhishek G, first tried the same strategy as the earlier one by claiming he had no information about my previous contacts. He said he couldn't find anything about my having been contacted by a supervisor before or anything about my being told earlier today that one would contact me (again). In fact, he again tried to insist that I perform the same diagnostic procedures that I've already performed that didn't diagnose or fix the problem. Most frustrating of all, he insisted that there is in fact nothing wrong with the fact that my battery depletes within 2-3 hours (even though that's a fraction of what it lasted just a couple of months ago) and he denied that anyone from HP had said or implied that such a short battery life is abnormal. He also made the claim that the battery must be fine or there would be a "failure ID" generated by the diagnostics that were run, which is interesting because the only way he could know that there was no such failure ID is if he had access to the records from my earlier conversations with HP that he claimed not to be able to locate. You see, I never told HIM that there was no failure ID because he hadn't asked, but it HAD come up in the conversation earlier today that Abhishek claimed to know nothing about.

At this point I'm beyond frustrated with HP's so-called "support". My laptop's battery is clearly defective and is still under warranty, though only for a few more weeks, and I suspect that's exactly the point of all this: HP hopes to "run out the clock" and have the warranty expire instead of acknowledging the problem and fixing it. Any advice on how to get this address is appreciated; thanks for "listening".

[Brett_S]

Does the silence from HP mean that there is no intention of addressing this problem?

[Brett_S]

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@Dragon-Fur wrote:

@Brett_S 

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@Brett_S wrote:

Does the silence from HP mean that there is no intention of addressing this problem?

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Not necessarily -

That said, HP does not maintain any official presence in the Community - "we" are not HP Support.

Our Community is a peer-to-peer user forum.

We have a Community moderator team and there are also automated checks for content and activities.

Community Experts and Agents do not generally comment on hate or horror mail.

There is little reason to do so - you are not talking to "Us" and we don't speak for HP.

So HP provides the links to this site and apparently hosts it but has no official presence here? That's disturbing in its own right, because I see threads like this one which include comments from people ("Echo_Lake" in this case) claiming to be employed by HP. It's surprising and concerning that HP would link to and host a website for the discussion of problems but not have its own employees involved, and even more so that it wouldn't address users falsely claiming to be part of the company.

[Dragon-Fur]

@Brett_S 

There are volunteer HP agents at our site.

Agents are HP employees who work on the Community as volunteers - they provide a valuable service to the Community.

It is not a false claim - It is poor choice of words on my part.

You have a copy of my response.

I will withdraw.

[Brett_S]

Okey dokey: you have a nice day! 😀