Apple and Razer top 2019 LaptopMag Tech Support Showdown

[justpoet]

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/tech-support-showdown

 

Apple stays at the top as usual in these sorts of things from most support surveys or tests.  Razer makes a HUGE jump from near the bottom last year to 2nd, and Dell keeps itself in the top 3.

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for more than a decade, we've gone undercover as everyday shoppers to test the phone, social media and web support that's provided by the leading laptop manufacturers. Here are tech support's biggest winners and losers for 2019.

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Apple has dominated the top spot in our rankings for the past few years, and that hasn't changed for 2019. The Cupertino company's tech support agents continue to be among the fastest and most knowledgeable in the business, delivering accurate answers to our Mac questions across live chat, social media and over the phone.

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The other big story this year was the rise of Razer. The gaming laptop brand climbed from second to last in 2018 to second place in 2019, going from offering zero phone support last year to presenting us with knowledgeable, thorough agents this year. And despite slipping a bit on the phone front, Dell retained its usual top three ranking with a third-place finish.

Perhaps even more impressive though is that MSI continues to suck up last place, even though Lenovo got every question wrong to end up second to last, just behind Huawei and Microsoft.

[TheSLSAMG]

1 minute ago, justpoet said:

Perhaps even more impressive though is that MSI continues to suck up last place

I don't think I've ever seen customer support as bad as MSI's. I've never heard so many bad things about customer service from any company.

 

Though Razer's leap from the bottom is quite impressive, I'd be interested in seeing how it fares long-term. For all of the things I don't like about Apple (including some aspects of their customer service), they usually do their best to solve problems.

[D13H4RD]

Given the Butterfly Keyboard fiasco, I don't see why they're still on the top. 

[xtroria]

35 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

Given the Butterfly Keyboard fiasco, I don't see why they're still on the top. 

Because they are one of the few companies that won't just give the product after you bought it and says "tough luck" to all the future problems.

 

At least apple doesn't make exploding phones and phone that breaks on its own in 2 days

[IAnthonyFX]

46 minutes ago, xtroria said:

Because they are one of the few companies that won't just give the product after you bought it and says "tough luck" to all the future problems.

 

At least apple doesn't make exploding phones and phone that breaks on its own in 2 days

yeah, they are more into the bendy products now.
 

[D13H4RD]

2 hours ago, xtroria said:

Because they are one of the few companies that won't just give the product after you bought it and says "tough luck" to all the future problems.

 

At least apple doesn't make exploding phones and phone that breaks on its own in 2 days

Eh, tbh, I haven’t received that sort of support from Apple in a long while.

 

The 2000s were pretty dang good but this era is just not good in terms of CS. 

 

Yes, Apple didn’t make a phone whose battery has a higher-than-usual chance of combustion and they didn’t make a phone that broke after 2 days, but they made a keyboard that became gimped from just a few specks of dust and never actually fixed the problem. Apple is not perfect. No company is. That’s why their response to issues is crucial.

[Blademaster91]

3 hours ago, xtroria said:

Because they are one of the few companies that won't just give the product after you bought it and says "tough luck" to all the future problems.

That isn't a good thing, Apple would rather tell their users tough luck and its their fault for things like their phone bending or the touch screen failing.

I'm wondering how much Apple paid to be on top of the list. And if Razer has good support, IMO it doesn't make up for the terrible quality control on their hardware.

3 hours ago, xtroria said:

At least apple doesn't make exploding phones and phone that breaks on its own in 2 days

Yeah , they're making the hardware fail on purpose under normal use, like keyboards,screens,and trackpads.

[Tribalinius]

Honestly, it feels relatively spot on for the normal consumers from my personal experience but I feel it's not painting the entire picture either. It's clearly targeted at consumers because it would be different in the commercial space. I would have probably put Acer further down the list because I had really bad experiences on multiple occasions with their tech support since the mid-2000s, especially with their consumer line. I'm done with them.

 

The one I'm most surprised with is definitely Lenovo though. We resell Lenovo servers/computers/laptops at work and I deal with the commercial tech support on a fairly regular basis. Granted we're not necessarily using the same communication channel as the writer of the article but I don't recall having really bad experiences with tech support in the last couple of years. I usually call for standard stuff like blown up HDDs or fried server boards so it's pretty straight forward when dealing with them. If we need specific information that we really can't find in their online documentation or further information regarding a piece of hardware/software for, let's say, compatibility issues in a quote, I ping my supplier that forward my questions to a Lenovo rep that get in touch with me afterward usually in the day or at most 24h later. I had about the same experience with HP when I used to resell their stuff. It just felt a bit more convoluted when it came to their documentation but I always had helpful people when needed. I can't speak for Dell but if you buy 10 of thousands of dollars worth of equipment every year and you have a dedicated rep for your account, I'm sure you are getting a response back in a matter of hours if not minutes lol. I'm not sure I would get the same level of treatment from ASUS in the commercial space.

 

But yeah, if we were not spending in the hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment every year, they would probably not care about us that much and I'd be stuck with normal communication channel with them.

[ZestyJalapeno]

42 minutes ago, Tribalinius said:

 

Your experience sounds like it's with enterprise B2B support, which is a whole different world and the provision of which is usually a contractual obligation. This is evaluation of end user B2C support, which unless you're a very patient person is mostly hassle and pain. Except for Seasonic and EVGA, those guys are ok

[Bananasplit_00]

I'm surprised anyone beat ASUS for the bottom slot tbh

[BuckGup]

Yeah no

[Commodus]

2 hours ago, Tribalinius said:

Honestly, it feels relatively spot on for the normal consumers from my personal experience but I feel it's not painting the entire picture either. It's clearly targeted at consumers because it would be different in the commercial space. I would have probably put Acer further down the list because I had really bad experiences on multiple occasions with their tech support since the mid-2000s, especially with their consumer line. I'm done with them.

 

The one I'm most surprised with is definitely Lenovo though. We resell Lenovo servers/computers/laptops at work and I deal with the commercial tech support on a fairly regular basis. Granted we're not necessarily using the same communication channel as the writer of the article but I don't recall having really bad experiences with tech support in the last couple of years. I usually call for standard stuff like blown up HDDs or fried server boards so it's pretty straight forward when dealing with them. If we need specific information that we really can't find in their online documentation or further information regarding a piece of hardware/software for, let's say, compatibility issues in a quote, I ping my supplier that forward my questions to a Lenovo rep that get in touch with me afterward usually in the day or at most 24h later. I had about the same experience with HP when I used to resell their stuff. It just felt a bit more convoluted when it came to their documentation but I always had helpful people when needed. I can't speak for Dell but if you buy 10 of thousands of dollars worth of equipment every year and you have a dedicated rep for your account, I'm sure you are getting a response back in a matter of hours if not minutes lol. I'm not sure I would get the same level of treatment from ASUS in the commercial space.

 

But yeah, if we were not spending in the hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment every year, they would probably not care about us that much and I'd be stuck with normal communication channel with them.

 

That's fairly accurate.  Apple has made some improvements in its business support, as I understand, but its customer support infrastructure is very much geared toward someone taking their MacBook into a store than a 200-unit corporate deployment.  It's the Lenovos and Dells that are better if you insist on having rapid turnaround or exact answers to business-related questions.

 

There's a pitfall to that, I'd say -- that emphasis on business support often seems to come at the expense of everyone else, like they're only concerned about the volume of potential customers they lose in a given transaction.  Just one person with a broken laptop?  Eh, we can afford to treat you like garbage.  A company IT manager?  We'll have a repair tech come over 10 minutes ago.

[justpoet]

I definitely agree with many of the above.  Having been an IT Consultant for quite some time, even when customer facing service and support was crap, business facing stuff was MUCH better.  When I started working that line of stuff in college, Dell was a joke at it and couldn't even give us machines that were the same so we could deploy images to them, but several years later were better than anybody except HP when dealing with businesses.

 

Also, keep in mind this is using a fairly generic set of questions and inquiries that could be made to all of the companies in a similar manner, surrounding laptops.  So, it won't capture when a company's hinge doesn't hold the screen up after a short bit, a track pad that sucks, or some keys that don't respond well for some folks, or anything for any phone/tablet device, as those wouldn't be the kind of support questions that are being used here towards all companies.

 

So, I think this is a fair set of observations of the companies public support lines and how helpful/quick they are to get a proper response.  I do, however, also agree that the famed Apple Support of years gone by no longer exists either.  Back when I got my first one, they bent over backwards for me and gave me a bunch of stuff and upgrades just because I found a bug in the CD player software that came with the computer (it would random, or repeat, but not both, if I remember correctly), back in the "It just works" era.  Too bad there aren't any companies that still care about software quality that much.