While I don’t pretend to have anywhere near the influence of Jeff Jarvis, or that this post will have the impact of his famous “Dell Hell” “Dell Sucks” rant on his blog of several years ago, I do think I need to vent about an experience I had last evening while trying to get someone at HP to help me with a problem DeskJet printer. I can only hope that my experience will somehow be picked up by HP. (And after all, I just wrote a book called The Art of Strategic Listening (Paramount Market Press, 2008) about how firms need to monitor consumer discussions on blogs and social media to track how they’re doing and identify trends)
The summary of my own HP Hell adventure is this: After I managed to find the correct customer contact number on the Web (no easy feat unto itself); the rest of the evening unfolded as follows:
Contact 1. 10pm: Reached HP’s “customer care”, and was told I would need to enter my credit card number and pay $34.95 up front in order for a technician to troubleshoot this with me. Not happy about this, but OK, at least if I’m paying—and paying upfront—at least I’d get some quick and effective help. The customer service person took down my problem (the printer icon disappeared from my printer folder and trying to reinstall drivers just gave me “fatal error” messages) gave me a confirmation number, ticket number and said “hold on I’m transferring you”.
ON HOLD…………………45 minutes…………….
Contact 2. 10:45pm. Man picks up the phone, hears my problem, apologies that “they transferred you to the wrong department”, and says “I’ll transfer you”…I say, OK, but I’ve been on hold for 45 minutes, so I hope that I can speak with someone quickly…
ON HOLD…………..10 minutes…………………
Contact 3: 10:55pm. Woman answers phone, asks me to repeat all my information again even though I give her my ticket number. She says “what department do you want?” I say I already told and paid for technical assistance. OK, “now I can refer you to a technician, she says “I’ll transfer you”. I say, “OK, so the next person will be able to help me, right, I’ve been waiting nearly an hour” She says yes…
ON HOLD……………20 minutes………………….
(I BEGIN TAKING NOTES NOW!)
Contact 4: 11:15 pm. I am sent to a voice mail menu where I am asked to press 1 for PCs; 2 for Printers and 3 to speak to a technician. (So should I hit 2 or 3?) I hit 3 for a technician.
ON HOLD………..5 minutes……………….
Contact 5: 11:20 pm I begin to hear very faint conversations in the background, and a distant, ethereal type of connection is made as I am on hold, but hear unintelligible background voices. A woman picks up and I know now I have been transferred to a call center in India. She tells me she will put me through to “technical support”. I am known for being a laid back and relaxed person, but I am getting agitated! I tell her I have talked to four or five people already. (And…Monday night means “Headlines” on Jay Leno at 11:45pm and I don’t want to miss it!) I am no longer very pleasant on the phone, but try to keep my cool. If I had not already paid for the service, and knew that starting over would be even worse, I would have hung up and called it a night
ON HOLD……..10 minutes….
Contact 6: 11:30 pm. Another woman at a call center in India. She asks me if I am calling for the “All in One” HP Printer. I say, no, I am calling for the Deskjet 1430. She says that she cannot help me and will need to transfer me to the department that handles that model. She then tells me to speak louder because she cannot hear me—our connection is terrible.
ON HOLD……10 minutes……….
Contact 7: 11:40 pm. A man in the India call center tells me that he is the technical support person and can help me. I explain my problem and he begins the troubleshooting process. He is friendly and responsive, but each time he asks me a simple question (e.g. “What icons do you see in your printer folder”), he needs to put me on hold for about 5 minutes to do, I don’t know what—look up what to do next in his technical manual?, assist other customers? After 30 minutes of this glacially slow conversation, we work together to power off the printer (his instructions to me were very strange but they worked—eg open and close the cover of your printer 4 times). At the end he asked me “Are you happy now?”
12:10 am. It’s now the next day! Leno’s Headlines is long over. Perhaps it wasn’t a funny one. But I didn’t have many laughs this evening.
- Total Time on Phone: 2 hours 10 minutes
- Total no. of Transfers: 7, to 6 humans; and one voice mail
- Level of Satisfaction: Zero
And how was your evening?
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