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Amazing disservice
By Dhaval Valia
Vendors today boast of having multi-channel customer support—toll-free numbers, an online presence, e-mail and SMS—over and above the usual service centers. There is not a single month when we don’t get press releases from vendors declaring how they are improving their post-sales support.
All this sounds marvelous, until you put their claims to test. That’s what I did recently when I felt the need to upgrade my notebook memory.
I called up HP’s toll-free support to find out the price, and a place from where I could buy OEM memory.
(While the how-to-buy feature on the HP Web site is good, it doesn’t provide me the option to find partners selling memory.)
The HP toll-free support wasn’t very helpful. The executive refused to give me an indicative price of the memory relevant for my model. He left me with the mobile number of the person in charge of Options sales in Mumbai. The Options sales rep was curt, took down details (product number and serial number), and promised a callback within one hour with price-and-place info.
There was no callback. I phoned him two days later.
He was kind enough to apologize for the delay, and instantly provided me the SRP of the product. However he refused to give me the where-to-buy info, promising that an authorized partner would call me up by the end of the day.
Not willing to wait further, I contacted an HP partner known to me. I discovered that there was a price variance of 25 percent between the SRP given by the HP rep and the quote given by the partner. While the HP rep had suggested a price of Rs 2,350 for a 1GB DDR2 667 module, the partner quoted Rs 1,800 and then offered me a special price of Rs 1,600.
Turned off, I decided to buy a third-party module. I went to the Kingston and Transcend Web sites to find an authorized dealer near my residence/office. Again I had to go through the maze of multi-channel customer support.
Kingston has a door-step service highlighted on their website, but when I called the toll-free number they asked me to call another sales rep. With Transcend I called up the distributors listed on their Web site, but nobody seemed interested in servicing an individual customer.
I finally decided to use my good offices, and mailed Kingston asking for the information. I am now getting the memory home-delivered.
Wonderful. But what about the thousands of customers who are not in a position of similar influence? |