Jason Dunn
12-14-2005, 06:00 AM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,123409,00.asp#' target='_blank'>http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,123409,00.asp#</a><br /><br /></div><i>"When your PC breaks, you shouldn't need a U.N. interpreter to communicate with tech support. Just ask Ronald Pippin, a CPA from Wheaton, Illinois, who twice encountered communication problems with technical support: once when he called Belkin about a defective wireless router, and again when he phoned Dell about a bad CD-ROM drive in his Dimension 8400 desktop system. The thick-accented Belkin rep "kept asking, 'What? What?'" Pippin says. "I even hung up once. I figured I'd call back and talk with someone who could speak better English." He did call again and eventually resolved the problem. His experience with Dell was just as frustrating. "It's not that they're dumb people," he acknowledges. But accents can pose a barrier "when you're talking about something technical." "</i><br /><br />This survey covers desktop and notebook PCs, but also digital cameras and audio players. The results are pretty interesting and map to what the market is at now for the most part - customers are most satisfied with the iPod, Canon and Sony make reliable products (Nikon got nailed for hard-to-use products), and no one can seem to make a wireless access point that really stands out. It was interesting to see how well Canon did with their printers though - they were rated significantly higher than HP, Epson, and everyone else. The exception is the multifunction category - most of the vendors were rated as merely average. I have a Canon MP780 multifunction, and for the most part it's been great, though it has a problem accepting more than four pages from the auto sheet feeder for faxing. It's frustrating, but not to irritating that I want to go without having the printer.<br /><br />My personal frustration with needing service has less to do with thick accents<!> (though it's been a problem for me now and then) and more to do with companies that don't operate their own service departments. If I have a product from XYZ, I want to talk to a tech support person from company XYZ. Samsung for instance has no real tech support - they just refer you to a local service centre where the "customer support" people make you feel like you're hassling them by calling for help. They typically have zero desire to trouble-shoot over the phone, and always suggest you bring the product in for them to look at. Another frustration are companies that don't give you replacement products to minimize downtime.<br /><br />I'll give big kudos to Dell here though - I have a W2600, a 26" LCD TV. It developed a bad pixel a few months back, and given the low-ish resolution (1280 x 768) stretched over a big LCD panel, the bad pixel was very obvious. As most of us know though, most companies require 5+ bad pixels before they'll do anything. So I lived with it. The W2600 developed another problem though where it wouldn't wake up properly from suspend mode. I'd have to physically power cycle it to get the display back. I decided to give Dell a call about this, expecting to be told it was a known issue and to live with it. Much to my surprise, the tech said this sounded like a defect and they cross-shipped me a brand new unit. I had five minutes of down time, and it was easy to ship the defective unit back because Dell provided a complete UPS shipping label - all I had to do was make a phone call. So Dell made it really easy for me, unlike <a href="http://www.xfxforce.com/web/home.jspa">XFX</a> who has the "ship us your card and maybe in 2-3 weeks you'll have a replacement" attitude.