2004 Best & Worst Tech support

J

j4zzee

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 6, 2004
Messages
290
It is the end of the year, so here are my nominations for The Best and Worst of 2004 tech support

2004 Best Award:
1. Cisco
2. Microsoft
3. Veritas

2004 Worst award:
1. Computer Associates
2. HP/Compaq
3. Zoom Modems

The times I have had to deal with Microsoft, Cisco, and Veritas have been fantastic. From great phone connections*, professional & attentive attitudes, and a complete total willingness to solve the problem at hand! thumbs up!! Cisco always amazes me; their TAC is the pinnacle of IT support. Microsoft gets the award in 2004!

The worst award goes to CA, Hewlett Packard, and Zoom Modems... they all stink!
Talk about bottom of the pile... even mentioning them is a waste of time! From incompetence to flat out rudeness... these are your companies.

*phone connections; yup, a crappy line to some remote support center SUCKS! When you are in a loud computer room and have to deal with a horrible connection it only adds to the problems!

Feel free to add to the Best and Worst list... :)
 
I can vouch for HP being no good. They almost seem like they are trying to be counter productive to your cause when you call them.
 
from my experience the way to go with hp is online. almost everything i have ever needed has been online (from netservers to printers). I hardly ever bother with phone support (for anyone) anymore. the only real time that i do is when i want an RMA or something.

I would like to add emachines/gateway to that list for the worst. in this case, phone support was my only solace in a sea of worthless information.

and really now, why is micro$oft on the list?
 
dlink.com - spent 4 30 minute stints on hold before I FINALLY got through... to the operator!?! She got someone to call me back. Man I was ticked off.

eglobalonline.com - Our organization bought $45,000 worth of computers from these idiots, and we had 2 mobo's go bad, so no prob, I'll just RMA right?? WRONG! I've emailed 4 times and called and left a message and NOTHING. I'm gonna try again today. idiots.

QJ
 
Add Unisys to the worst side. Their support requires you to leave a name and number and wait for them to call you back. Almost everytime I've called them I've resolved or issolated the problem while waiting for them to call back. And when I don't solve it myself, the Unisys solution is to put me on hold while they call Dell tech support. (Unisys rebrands Dell equipment) Talk about frustrating.
 
QwertyJuan said:
dlink.com - spent 4 30 minute stints on hold before I FINALLY got through... to the operator!?! She got someone to call me back. Man I was ticked off.

eglobalonline.com - Our organization bought $45,000 worth of computers from these idiots, and we had 2 mobo's go bad, so no prob, I'll just RMA right?? WRONG! I've emailed 4 times and called and left a message and NOTHING. I'm gonna try again today. idiots.

QJ
Click to expand...

I will second Dlink. They are atrocious.

I had a problem with one of their unmanaged GigE switches. I explained it to the original tech that answered my call who had to put me on hold everytime I refuted one of his suggestions so that he could consult his manual/coworker/genie/toile/whatever...
Finally he put me through to "Tier 2" support. That guy was just an ass that wanted to blame everything else in my network. When I pointed out (not so nicely at this point as I had spent the better part of the last hour in this madness) that the only things that changed were GigE NICs on some servers, but the rest of the servers with slow network responses were simply removed from the old 10/100 switch and put onto the Dlink switch. He promptly started yelling at me to tell him was was wrong since I "knew so much".

I told the guy that I will NEVER buy another Dlink POS ever again and that I made a mistake thinking that Dlink was mature enough to put their shit into a workplace environment.
 
I'll add Netgear to the list. I just sat on hold for 20 minutes and finally got one of their pre-sale reps.

The guy had no knowledge of their products or how they work. :rolleyes:
 
deadoralive said:
ps dell sucks too
Click to expand...


I assume your referring to the general customer/consumer support. Their premier support is outstanding. Platinum Premier support is about as good as it gets. 4 hour parts, immediate response to pretty much any issue we have. Excellent. As far as consumer grade support goes, I really couldn't say. Their corporate solutions are top notch.
 
our company has dell gold tech support.. I had to call em to get a dead HD replaced.. it was some guy in idaho and he asked me how the weather was... the line quality was very poor, however...
 
Rogue4mula said:
our company has dell gold tech support.. I had to call em to get a dead HD replaced.. it was some guy in idaho and he asked me how the weather was... the line quality was very poor, however...
Click to expand...
At least it wasnt in India
 
I've only called tech support once this year - when an ink cartridge in our Epson printer exploded and shot ink ALL OVER the insides of the printer. Of course, since it was out of warranty they wouldn't help. Still, I expected them to do something because it was their printer cartridge that malfunctioned...

As far as networking...all my problems happen at night, so I end up solving them by googling around or on the forums. By the time the lines are back open I'm done.
 
My votes:

Worst:
1) Sbcglobal
2) HP
3) Compusa

Best:
1) Speakeasy
2) Dell
3) Microsoft

I'll explain my nominations a bit:

SBCglobal
Not that I need to explain, I think, for any of you who have dealt with them. But, should you ever need to call them for more than a simple password reset ( ie: anything you need a real human for ), you are fucked. I can't even begin to explain all the problems I've had with them, but needless to say, they will never get any more of my business, even if that means I have to turn down contracts to avoid them.

HP
From missing equipment to dropped sales orders, I can't say enough bad things about these folks. They used to be good, from what I understand, but I haven't seen that yet.

Compusa
Compusa has lost so much money in business from me over the past year simply by default: They haven't had what I wanted when I wanted it. Not that big of a deal on a consumer level, but I do contracts too, and they are the only local computer shop. We're talking probably 50+ grand for this local store alone in lost sales this year.

Speakeasy
Now this...this is a company. I've only had to call once, about a billing issue, which was resolved in 5 minutes, from the time I picked up the phone to the time I hung up. Their service has been outstanding, I've never had to call them about it.

Dell
 Some of you have had problems with dell, but I've only had positive experiences. The office I work in is full of dells. When a system breaks ( not a common occurance ), I call them up. Sure, I have to wade through the phone menu system, but then I'm connected to a live human who can actually trouble shoot over the phone. The next day, the parts are here waiting for me to install them. No force fed tech coming out to install the parts, although that would be free if I so choose. My one complaint is they won't accept my diagnosis of the situation.

Microsoft
I should qualify this: The only time I've had to call them is to reactivate something, and in that regard they know their business. Quick, clean, no hassle. Can't argue with that.
 
Best:
Microsoft - PSS rules the day. There is really no other way to put it. When you plunk down 250 to get an issue resolved, you're connected with people that absolutely know their shit and don't put you through doing pointless troubleshooting steps. 9/10 they will accept your diagnosis of the situation and the steps you've already performed. They work with you through to the end and have full access to everything they need.

Middle:

Dell is iffy. Even gold support is no gaurentee. I had a few gx270s that were shutting down due to thermal event. First tech has me run a full hd surface scan :rolleyes:, puts me on hold after it's done and we get disconnected. I don't get a return call (had given my number in the beginning of the call for just that scenario). Next guy has me reseat the processor but doesn't ask anything about my environment before doing so. It turns out, after some googleling, that the boards were known to have shipped with bad caps and if they leak they can cause a multitude of problems including the thremal event shutdown. I open the case and sure enough both comps had leaking caps.

Veritas:

They fall in the middle as well when compared to MS. Indian techs aren't bad, but there just doesn't seem to be the same level of comittment as from MS. Add that to the 1hr+ hold queues and it really becomes frustrating.

Low:

I luckily haven't had to deal with any support that I'd classify as low. Iomega was a bit of a pain in the ass to deal with on a bad external hard drive, but that was a one off kinda thing.
 
I guess I don't see the problems with HP support because I dont' deal with HP directly. When I've got a problem I call up my local HP authorized shop and tell them I've got a bad hard drive and give them the serial number. The part shows up by 10:00am the next morning. No muss no fuss.
 
I said two bad ones, so I will say a good one now...

Lexmark

Yes believe it or not! I called and within 5 minutes we were diagnosing my printer, in 15 they said it was bad and sent me out a new one THAT DAY without any CC or anything, just told me to put the old one back in the box and send it back to them. They paid shipping both ways and had a new printer in less than a week. This is the way customer support is SUPPOSED to be.

QJ
 
CA sure is bad. It took me over a month of emailing to get a problem resolved of my exchange server not getting backed up properly. I still don't know why it finally decided to work, but it did and I haven't touched it since.
 
XOR != OR said:
Speakeasy
Now this...this is a company. I've only had to call once, about a billing issue, which was resolved in 5 minutes, from the time I picked up the phone to the time I hung up. Their service has been outstanding, I've never had to call them about it.
Click to expand...

I'll second Speakeasy. I moved my parents to them when Cox's cable service went down the crapper 5-6 years ago and we've had absolutely no problems. I guess this is also a testament to Covad since they are the ones that actually own the phone lines. But, as far as billing and such goes Speakeasy is great.
 
worst - sony !!!!!

It took me 4 hours on the phone to get restore disks for my ex-girlfriend's laptop
:mad: \
u_DR_K13
 
I wanna put IBM in there for best!

I had to send my laptop back, I still had the original box and everything ot send it with. But no they overnighted me a new box, with easy to use packing material, FREE of cost. And a return label to send it back to them overnight.

I really liked that, not having to pay to send it in for repair. And both times I talked to people they spoke clear english.

When I've spoken with Dell I've had a hard time understanding their foreigners. Take Dell off the best list :mad:
 
Best:
1) Cisco
2) Our reseller
3) Trend Micro
4) My own personal contacts
5) CompUSA

Worst:
1) SBC
2) Dell
3) Juniper
4) IpSwitch
5) Broadcom

Explanations:

Cisco: Enough said.

Our reseller: They have a bang up staff of SE's who know their shit. I have a list of people I can email or call about various issues, and if I dont speak with them immediately, I get my answer in under two hours usually. Since they deployed Blackberry the response time has been cut in half.


Trend Micro: These guys rock. They love us too because we find all the bugs (not many) in their product for them lol. They usually fix them pretty quick. When they were beta testing 6.5, guess who they came to and asked for help in designing the corporate firewall. They didn't use all my suggestions, but they used some and flagged the rest for 7.0. We have a direct line to call when we have issues, and they're usually resolved within an hour.

My own personal contacts: I've got a lot of friends. I tap their info, they tap mine. There's more than one way to network. :)

CompUSA: I dont know if we have the only good corporate sales rep employed by CompUSA or what. But this girl is pretty good. We dont buy much from CompUSA (relatively speaking, of course) but if we do need something yesterday we'll usually call her first. She gets us good pricing, gives us gifts, and can usually find what we want and get it to us immediately. If we have a problem with something we got from them, she sends someone to pick it up and it's taken care of. This is the way it should be. She'll probably get fired for treating customers right, too.

SBC: I absolutely HATE dealing with these guys. Their level 1 tech support almost always has a holier-than-thou "You dont know what you're talking about" attitude. I usually lose my cool when talking to these ignorant fools. We haven't had many problems with our circuits over the years, but the times we have had problems we have usually gotten conflicting reports about what the problem is from different tech support guys and from our account reps. At some point during a problem situation, it usually becomes "our fault" for a brief period of time.

Dell: Non-english speaking idiots who think everyone in the world is miraculously dumber than they are.

Juniper: Their website sucks, and so does their phone support. When we had to switch from using Neoteris's website to Juniper's for support, their registration form was broken for weeks that allowed customers to migrate their account. Then when we finally could migrate, they were having "database" issues...this being 6 months after the required customers to migrate. Database issues that prevent us from registering our product on their site and being able to download updates for it. Their phone support, although decent when they manage to call you back, has the longest turn-around time for problem resolution I think I have ever seen second to SBC. Their SE's and field guys are top notch though, and when you bitch to an SE at Juniper, it goes high-up real fast and stuff gets solved quickly.

IpSwitch: I dont think I've ever gotten a problem resolved from them. Usually it's "our product doesn't support that." Then when I figure out how to do it, I make sure to call them back and tell them that it does, in fact, do that.

Broadcom: So if you dont support a piece of software your company makes, why do you stamp your frigging logo all over it? Seriously, when I have a problem dont tell me to call Dell, just answer my damn question.
 
Yes, the Joe Blow consumer Dell support is dificult when you don't get one of the US support locations. (One is here in Alabama) If you are talking about enterprise support, specifically the platinum support, it is outstanding.
 
ktwebb said:
Yes, the Joe Blow consumer Dell support is dificult when you don't get one of the US support locations. (One is here in Alabama) If you are talking about enterprise support, specifically the platinum support, it is outstanding.
Click to expand...
I dont think we have platinum support. But I've talked to the server guys at Dell about networking issues we had with their servers before, and everyone I talked to was an idiot until I got to the real high-up guys, and they refuse to pass you up higher in the chain until you go through all their idiot-procedures. They have never taken "I've already done all that" as an answer. It takes WAY longer than it needs to, and leads to a very frustrated customer by the time you get to the guys who can actually help you.

To their credit, they are good about sending out replacement parts immediately without forcing you to use a tech of theirs.
 
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned DirecTV. Has anyone mentioned Verizon?

.B ekiM
 
Let me put in a vote for ATI in the "sucks" column. Earlier last year (04) I got a 9800 AIW to replace an old AIW 128. Some of the basic TV features were screwey with the 8 version of the TV suite (the old one only used the 7 version). Some channels were bad, the sound was very low coming in from the tuner. I called their support in Canada and spend 45 minutes, twice, (and the $45 in long distance charges), to get the solution "if you don't like it, return it." Piss-poor. It is amazing how terrible their software/support side is compared to their excellent hardware.

Sprint PCS when I cancelled: "you are already into this month's billing cycle, we have to bill you for a whole month." So, I can only cancel on the one day my billing cycle changes? Outrageous.
 
ktwebb said:
Yes, the Joe Blow consumer Dell support is dificult when you don't get one of the US support locations. (One is here in Alabama) If you are talking about enterprise support, specifically the platinum support, it is outstanding.
Click to expand...

I completely disagree. We contracted them in thier "Professional Services" division to do my company's domain collapse and migration. We had so many issues that myself, and the rest of my IT team had to do ourselves. At one point they were telling us an issue we had was going to be impossible to resolve. I ended up figuring out a solution within a matter of hours. The sad thing is we were paying them A LOT of money. They may as well of just tacked that money on my bonus check.
 
Dell is pretty horrible..

I vote fore IBM and SUN. Their tech support is outstanding.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top