The Glade 4.0

While looking up laptop reviews, one thing stood out to me as odd.

MSI had almost universally bad customer service reviews from customers who had to use it.

But then, I also own an old Asus laptop, and Asus gets bad service reviews too. (Nevermind that my own experiences with Asus customer service have been generally positive.)

So on a whim, I started checking out laptop OEMs on http://www.customerservicescoreboard.com ...

Ratings are based on #ofNegativeComments:#ofPositiveComments on their website.

Apple- 385:69
Asus- 765:106
Dell- 497:33
Gateway- 269:21
Hewlett-Packard- 891:47
Lenovo- 317:12
MSI- 54:3
Samsung- 1142:70
Toshiba- 557:21

(Acer is oddly absent from the site.)

I've come to the conclusion people are self-entitled morons who have unrealistic expectations and that it's impossible to get an accurate idea what a company's customer service is like until you have to deal with them.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Apple- 5.58:1
Asus- 7.22:1
Dell- 15.06:1
Gateway- 12.81:1
Hewlett-Packard- 18.96:1
Lenovo- 26.42:1
MSI- 18.00:1
Samsung- 16.31:1
Toshiba- 26.52:1

Perhaps you can assume that the distribution of self-entitled moronitude is consistent across vendors?

I'm not sure how you adjust for rampant fanboyism and the cult of brand identity, though.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

People who have positive comments generally don't feel compelled to go to a review board and post them.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

This is true.

Again, the best you can hope for is that the people who would be inclined to are evenly distributed across brands.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Apple customer service really is great if you've got AppleCare. If not, you're kinda pissing in the wind. They do make a pretty common practice of just completely replacing a device if something is seriously wrong with it, though. Probably because a lot of their **** can't be taken apart and repaired!

Well... even with AppleCare, sometimes it can be incredibly lousy.

Here at work, we were notified that one of our iMacs was from a lot that used a batch of hard drives that have been experiencing high failure rates. Their offer? Bring it to us, and we'll replace the hard drive for free. With no attempt at data transfer.

So, they're kindly encouraging me to bring our computer in, and leave it there for 1-2 weeks, so that I can avoid the possibility for data loss... so they can guarantee data loss.

What an excellent deal. Meanwhile, we're out a computer for the employee that uses it.

We opted to just wait for it to actually fail, if it was actually going to.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Aye that sucks but in all fairness I've seen that happen a lot on the PC side as well. My boss has had two hard drives replaced in his laptops... One of them was replaced without telling him, and all of his data was lost. The second, he requested a replacement and for them to give him the old drive back, and they just tossed it :/

A dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-15 people about their experience. Around 13% of dissatisfied customers tell more than 20 people. – White House Office of Consumer Affairs

Happy customers who get their issue resolved tell about 4-6 people about their experience. – White House Office of Consumer Affairs

Like Coro said, people who are happy don't post. Generally, review forums/comment locations are overly negative.

I'm not sure why you'd care about any of their customer service records. Does product work? If yes, buy, if not, don't buy. Computer parts aren't what I would call a service industry, and chances are, any problems you might have with their products, you're going to either handle yourself or take to someone who can fix it, rather than badgering the company itself.

Overall, the customer service record for the producer of my motherboard is completely inconsequential to me. Granted, I consistently have issues with my video card falling out, but it hasn't once occurred to me that calling the card's manufacturer was a solution. Perhaps it should. Personally, I'm thinking of just welding it in place.

As a warranty provider, I feel compelled to chime in here, though I'm not sure what to say.

Though working with/for both companies I'm shocked that Dell's ratio is as low and it is and lower than Lenovo. Maybe its that I get the same guys that user support gets on the dell side and my Lenovo peeps are just better. Dell Pro support guys are generally reasonable souls (and Americans to boot). I don't think it's the individuals fault though. They are locked into their own little script world and aren't knowledgeable enough/allowed to deal with it.

It's crazy how many times I get dinged on my reviews even with me telling the customers that any questions with the word "onsite" in them just have to do with my performance.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

As an aside, every single metric you could possibly use to rate a customer service center's effectiveness in anything is patently flawed, because customer service inherently requires human interaction, something which we, as humans, have been failing spectacularly at quantifying since forever.

Your average customer service call includes one each: Call center representative who has been dealing with irate customers all day, and irate customer who has been dealing with call center representatives all day. You can draw your own conclusions about how that story generally ends.

I don't have to. I'm the one who gets called out to make it all right. And it is as much of a "hand holding" experience as it is a technical repair one.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

So what you're saying is that you're the one standing at the bottom of the hill.

I'm not likely going to be repairing my own notebook if it fails. If it's not under warranty, most of the time it won't even get repaired, because the parts are too expensive.

Asus has the lowest notebook failure rate in the business, while HP has the worst. But what's really shocking is how high the failure rates really are. Asus's industry-leading best is almost a 10% failure rate within 2 years, and a 15.6% failure rate within 3 years. Apple is at 4th with a 12%-2yrs/17.4%-3yrs. HP's is an abysmal 16% in 2 years, 25.6% in 3 years. The odds are very good that if you buy a notebook computer, you will be dealing with warranty support at some point.

Having owned an Asus that had a failure (twice) over its two year warranty period, I have to say, Asus had excellent support. They arranged the shipping, paid for it all, replaced not just the cooling fan that had failed but any parts that may have been overheating during that time, and shipped it back to me, both times in about a week. That's about as comprehensive as one can hope for for warranty support. (I notice new models of the same laptop have engineering changes to help prevent this type of failure and make servicing easier.) So it matters to me how painless the manufacturer makes the process.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

A lot of that is that laptops get bumped around and jostled and such even when carefully handled, and even those that are carefully handled often suffer minor accidental drops and such. Even if they don't really damage anything, all those bumps and bangs accumulate over time.

I've had the power connector go in two laptops now. That's the place you put stress and pressure on every time you insert and remove the power cord... and every time you catch the cord with your foot, or something like that.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This isn't about failure rate. All reliability (or rather, a lack of it) does is give people more opportunities to deal with support. When it comes to failure rate, all i've been able to find is this (and it doesn't include every brand):

Brand / Failure Rate (3 Yr)
1 Asus 15.6%
2 Toshiba 15.7%
3 Sony 16.8%
4 Apple 17.4%
5 Dell 18.3%
6 Lenovo 21.5%
7 Acer 23.3%
8 Gateway 23.5%
9 HP 25.6%

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

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In time, this too shall pass.

I'd say those failure rates show pretty conclusively that Asus makes a tougher laptop than HP. Hardly surprising. I had an HP desktop once too, and it was ***.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Fanboys obsessed with brand identity love feeling bohemian at starbucks by displaying the way-overpriced products they own? There's big a surprise! I think I'm going to have a heart attack and die of not surprise!

It also has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. This thread started about customer perception of warranty service (where it appears most people are self-entitled morons and have universally bad opinions of all OEMs - even Apple, where perceptions of service are the best of a sorry bunch!) and I touched on reliability (which is not subjective at all, where Apple is solidly fourth out of 9 manufacturers rated).

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Where did you get the failure numbers? Again I'm shocked that Lenovo scores so high since they are supposed to be the superior brand.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Both references cite the same source, but I've never heard of them.

I'm not sure about other manufactures, but I know that using any warranty plans other than AppleCare for Apple product statistics is questionable.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Percentage of people who come to you with hardware failures is going to be the same regardless of who supplied the extended warranty.

ASUS has for several years been rated by several sources as the most reliable manufacturer in the business. Apple's been having very recent issues with Retina-display laptops running too hot...not enough room inside and no airflow, and an obsession with keeping noise levels down...

Despite this, Apple is reliable enough for me. The biggest problems with them are: (1) they cost three times more than better laptops made by other manufacturers, and (2) you have to pay extra to buy Windows and install it on them before they become useful, (3) even after you do, they're woefully underpowered in the GPU department (The best GPU apple puts in a notebook right now is a GeForce 650M 1GB, which is slower than the GPU in my 4 year old ASUS that I'm replacing), (4) and have no room for both Solid State and data drives. Lastly, (5) they discontinued their 17" models. I'm not going to be gaming on a 15" display.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

My biggest problem with AppleCare is that not only does Apple gouge you for basic customer service and warranty provisions other manufacturers give you by default, but that for adequate product coverage, I have to pay them an additional $1000 over 3 years just to get the same service Asus or Dell provides for free or one time fee that's less than $100. $349 a year for a maximum of 3 years vs. $100.

Sorry, but this is where Apple REALLY loses in the value argument; and that makes me sad, because they made/make a good portable.

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349 a year? My AppleCare (Delaware & corporate discount) was about 280$ fixed on a very high end MBP...

( hi taly ;-p )