Drumlish: HP Support Incompetence

[SedonaF]

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Forum-Feedback-and-Suggestions/HP-Support-Incompetence/td-p/666049

On Saturday, April 4th, I called technical support.  After 2 hours -- mostly on hold -- they establish that the hard drive has crashed and agree to send a new hard drive and recovery disks.  I also order the $15 recovery disk set for my other HP computer because it turns out that the recovery disks you make when you first get your computer can't restore to a reformatted hard drive, so if you ever need to do that, you're stuck waiting for many days.

I am a native speaker of English.  One of the technicians I spoke with was almost completely unintelligible to me.  Others clearly didn't know what they were talking about and seemed incapable of grasping the notion that someone would actually want to reformat a hard drive and reinstall the computer's operating system clean -- even though this is a fairly standard maintenance procedure.  Virtually every piece of information had to be repeated several times.  The technicians seemed to be under the impression that they were doing me a favor.  Mysteriously, none of them had a unique identifier other than their first name.  BTW, how many guys claiming to be named Ryan do you know who speak with a South Asian accent?

The disks I paid for, for the computer that's working fine, arrive by the end of the week.  But no sign of the hard drive and recovery disks for the computer that isn't work and -- oh, did I mention this? -- is still under warranty.

So I call this morning.  Over an hour on the phone.  There's no trace of the order in the system, even though I have a confirmation number that was given to me over the phone the previous week.  No record under the computer's serial number, no record under my phone number, no record under my email address.  In fact, there is no record of any contact with technical support -- including the order I placed and received last week.  At the end of an hour, I'm given a case number and told that someone from "case management" will call.  Great.  That's right.  I've got nothing to do but sit around and wait for someone from HP to call about how they've screwed up a support request.  And that call will arrive when?  2:00 a.m.?  But it gets better...

Somehow, the fact that the hard drive needs to be replaced has still not registered on any of the three geniuses I speak to this morning -- even though they've all been told this several times.  They seem to lock on the word "recovery disk".  What is the "case manager" going to call me about?  "Compensation" for the recovery disk.

Great, so it seems that HP has decided to hire technical support people with no listening skills and an understanding of the workings of a computer inferior to that of it customers.

I might buy another HP computer, I suppose -- if I wanted to give it to an enemy.

[JeffHelp1]

05/10/11- Jeff reached out to customer