Shawnee Love   •  
October 19, 2010

Last week, I had a frustrating experience with technical support for my laptop. The problem wasn’t serious but it had happened before. The last time it happened, I called tech support and was immediately through. The person on the other end of the phone was polite, articulate, and actually solved my problem within about 15 minutes. Smooth sailing and I was convinced I had bought from the right company.

Contrast to last week when I had to make three separate calls because my call kept failing (I will never know whose fault that was). Each time, they asked for my number “so they could call me back in case the call was dropped”, but no one called me back. When I did get to speak with a live person, I had to repeat myself over and over and couldn’t understand what they wanted me to do because of the heavy accent. We ended up using the military alphabet “delta, charlie, foxtrot…”. It took one hour to fix the problem during which time I asked if we could simply review the service record on my laptop from my last logged call to see how to solve my problem (because supposedly my service code is made for tracking this information). I was told there was no record available. Where did it go?

My computer is fixed, so I should be happy except I was so impressed during the first call with tech support that this time pales in comparison. That is the double edged sword of great customer service is that your customers expect it from you. For great customer service to be great, you have to deliver all the time.  Inconsistently great is worse than consistently so so.