Nice to see this. I fell through the famous ‘bezel’ problem when the new lenovos with centrino duos came out, and actually cited ‘marketing doing tech support’ in the MBA class I teach.

My web site (and new blog) has more on tech support, and my quest to help support folks earn and demand respect on behalf of their customers.

I welcome people who are interested in making service the heartbeat of a company join in the conversation on my blog. You can also find links to a number of organizations that are in the space and are doing interesting research.

http://www.verghisgroup.com

Peace,

Phil

Dear Mr. Churbuck:

I’m writing to follow up on a brief voice mail message that I left on your cell phone number tonight. I assumed that you would eventually ask me to provide some kind of written communique, so I decided that I might as well do it now.

The reason I contacted you is because you had the courage to place your personal cell phone number on your blog. I happened to find it in March when I was first having problems with a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 that I purchased in January. The fact that you understood that customers expect to buy a functioning product–regardless of whether “functioning” means hardware, software, operating system, or whatever–really impressed me. I’m only just now contacting you because I am only just now reaching the end of my rope.

First, just a bit about me. I’m a graduate student, which means I’m poor. It was very important to me to purchase a ThinkPad because I loved the product (having owned one before when I was a lawyer and had much more disposable income!), even though the purchase meant falling behind on my rent and utility bills. I figured it was worth it and that I would eventually thank myself for making the difficult decision to part with such a big chunk of money.

Unfortunately, the computer was a dud almost right out of the box. Less than two months after the item was shipped, I started having some serious audio problems, accompanied by extreme delays in getting Windows to shut down. After speaking with a series of fairly unhelpful service representatives and eventually demanding that the problem be escalated to someone with the authority to give me a replacement or a refund, I was referred to a supervisor named “Amazing”–amazing was exactly what he was. He told me that replacement or refund would be options to pursue if he escalated the problem to another level, but we agreed that the better solution was simply to FIX the problem. He put a superb service representative in touch with me and told me that I should contact him again directly if I continued to have problems in order to discuss replacement or repair. The service representative’s name was Xoese (but he goes by “X”). He stayed on the line with me for nearly two hours to try to diagnose the problem. Eventually, his recommendation was for me to reinstall the operating system, but he offered to speak with me again after I had done so if I needed further help.

Needless to say, I wasn’t happy. This was in March, the computer was less than two months old, and I was being told to do something that I knew from prior experience did not bode well for the future–I’ve only been told to reinstall an OS when the problem was SERIOUS, and the only times I have done so signaled the beginning of the end for the computer in question. However, given X’s kindness, patience, and expertise, I went along with his suggestion. As I’m sure you know, this was a tedious and time consuming process, even without taking into account the fact that I had to reload all of my software applications and re-tune them to my preferred settings.

Immediately after reinstalling Windows XP, I began to experience new and different problems. I contacted Amazing and left a voice mail–I never got a response. The same thing happened with X. Once I had accumulated a list of 13 new problems, I contacted customer service again and spoke to James Armstrong, who was basically useless. Nothing that he suggested worked, and he wasn’t even able to communicate with me effectively because he didn’t have access to a machine running Windows XP. A few weeks later and I tried again–Jason Adams gave me some advice, which essentially involved running anti-virus and anti-spyware software while in Safe Mode. If there is a way to enter Safe Mode on the ThinkPad T60, I haven’t been able to find it. So basically I gave up.

Until tonight. ThinkVantage Access Connections has been dropping my wireless connection regularly, and I haven’t been able to run ThinkVantage System Update for weeks–it always says that it is unable to connect to the proxy server, whatever that means. The representative I spoke to tonight told me that the problems I was experiencing were really software-related rather than hardware-related, and that all he could do was to recommend reinstalling a few drivers in a certain order. He said that Lenovo’s policy about its warranty service had recently changed, and that service representatives were no longer permitted to walk customers through software problems–apparently not even if the software is ThinkVantage.

So that’s where I’m left tonight. I’m out to the tune of about $2,000 that I could ill afford in the first place, I have a computer that I’ve never really been able to trust or rely on, and Lenovo customer service either won’t respond to me or tells me (albeit very politely) that I’m just S.O.L.

Can you please help me? All I want is what I paid for–a computer that works reliably. If that means spending eight hours on the phone with a service representative who can actually help me get the computer fixed, fine; I’ll do it. If that means turning in this computer for another T60 or some equivalent item and starting over from scratch, great; I’m willing to do that too. If that means just returning the computer for a full or a partial refund so that I can go buy another item from another company, I can even live with that. Whatever you can manage to do–during your no-doubt very busy schedule–in order to take care of just one, single customer who feels that he has been abused and abandoned by a brand he loved, I would surely appreciate. You’re basically my last hope. Please don’t let me down.

Came across an interesting post today by David Churbuck called Proactive tech support – further thinking … It’s an interesting read, and I generally like the ideas he espouses. And while I think he’s coming at it from a different

When it arrived the fingerprint reader turned out to be faulty (it simply wasnt recognised by the OS and the software wasnt installed: a QA issue?). A certain amount of trepidation preceded phoning tech support, but all was well – short wait time, helpful person who got an engineer to call me back within an hour, and a replacement part with easy to follow instructions arrived in the post in less than 24hrs. I was impressed.

The warrenty is international: great.
It’s not immediately clear who to call, however. Clearly it is sensible to have different numbers for different countries, but nowhere does it say if you should call your geographically local number if you are on the road, or the number in the country of purchase. Laptops travel internationally with their users more and more, and don’t descriminate as to where they may develop problems. A small complaint, perhaps, but not trivial.

But even so (I took a guess, called the UK), there is no one number: The numbers listed in ‘Support Information’ (right clicking on My Computer, etc) are different to those on the website, and different again to a number a google search supplied. I do not know if they all work – I would almost think they probably do. But it put me off, it worried me, and it made me nervous, where I didnt have to.

I ended up calling the UK number, but they had issues finding my serial number on the Lenovo/IBM database; they seemed confused by it being purchased in the States. In the end, I forwarded my purchase confirmation email to them, and this helped them find it, but not everyone has immediate access to this information (or even keeps it), and I don’t know how helpful they could have been without this.

Finally, it was all a happy ending, and I came away impressed: The entire process was a far sight better than anything else I have experienced.. But nevertheless, there were minor bumps along the way, and I hope these can be smoothed…