Personal Rant - Death of Customer Service & Brand Name Quality

I am convinced that the first time I ever said the words, "when I was a kid" in response to some modern day dilemma I officially became a fossil. Well that right of passage happened to me back when I was only in my 20’s so I guess now I am a full-fledged geezer! The latest "geezer moment" happened today while taking my laptop back to Micro Center for the second time to get the same problem fixed. First a little background.

I bought a brand new laptop from Micro Center back a bout 5 months ago. It was an HP, and I made the mistaken assumption that a major brand might be slightly better than an off brand unit. The thing began going on the fritz a few weeks ago and I called the friendly folks in India, where HP phone lines lead, to get assistance. Somewhere in Bangalore, a friendly woman who spoke broken English asked me a battery of questions for personal information and then transferred me to someone in the US who got none of the info I had given previously. He told me that the India folks never forward the information correctly, so I answered the battery of questions again.

Finally I got down to the problem, which he promptly told me was a virus. He said that even though I had the latest updates for my virus protection it must have gotten through and I had to reformat my hard drive. To do this HP has a secondary drive in the laptop…however, this did not work as described, prompting another call to Bangalore and then back to the US. This time the tech person sold me a backup disk, since one was not supplied. $35 later I had a disk being shipped to me.

I re-imaged the hard drive according to instructions and within 3 hours the computer froze again. Off to Micro Center to have their folks look at it, after all I bought a $300 Gold Protection plan, why not use it?
There I was greeted by a guy who took very poor notes about the problem and told me a technician would call me. He did and said it was a software problem, they re-imaged the disk, $75 charge not covered by the Gold Plan. I came back to pick up the computer and asked if they had run it for a while to be sure it was not a hardware problem. They said the diagnostic showed it was OK, a clever way of not really answering the question. Finally after I assured them I would be very unhappy should it crash again, they agreed to keep it a few days and "stress test" it.

I picked it up yesterday and promptly went home to reinstall all my programs. This morning it locked up exactly as before and I returned to Micro Center…and as promised, I was not happy! After explaining the problem again and showing them a picture of the screen when it crashed (I love camera phones), they took it back to a technician. After a few minutes they returned and said that it was indeed a hardware problem.

Now comes the geezer part. When I was younger, stores prided themselves on customer service. Some places would even just replace the product the minute they understood you were having trouble with it. They made the customer feel like you were valued and a genuine human being to be respected and catered to. Boy do I feel old.

The experience with Micro Center and HP has shown me that I am no longer a valued customer, just another sheep to be sheered. I am a number on a profit and loss page and unless I become too much of a liability, I will be dealt with in the most efficient manner possible for the company. With the exception of the last customer service person I spoke with, everyone treated me like I was incompetent, stupid or just another warm body. I was not listened to, I was not treated with respect that I think should be due to every customer and I was not impressed.

UPDATE: Well MicroCenter has made good on their warranty and they replaced my computer with a comparable one. Problem was it was an HP and when I got it home I found the wireless LAN card was defective! Sooo...I took it back and exchanged it for a Toshiba. No more HP for me. The MicroCenter Manager was very understanding and he listened to me (a good thing). He gave me a store credit on the difference in the Toshiba price and the HP and won me over.

I have to retract my rant about MicroCenter, at least as far as their manager in Dallas is concerned. Now about HP? Well still haven't heard from them from my first service case. I guess Bangalore is too far to really care about my "computer being personal again."