HP customer service

[BiotechBen]

So while at Microcenter getting my new laptop, the sales guy was trying to get me into a better bank for the buck system (objectively it was, but it was above my price range and more power than I need).

As we got talking, he mentioned that everyone he has come across have had nothing but nightmare stories with HP customer service. 

All but two of the computers I have owned have been HP, and I have had never a bad thing to say, white glove service and super incredibly helpful and polite and everything. 

 

Am I the golden sample?

 

[RONOTHAN##]

I've dealt with worse, but I've dealt with a lot better. I bought a laptop from them a few years back (some sort of convertable, I forget the model and don't feel like figuring it out) and it just wouldn't function with the touch screen. I ended up on call with support for a few hours, they got it to work for a few minutes, hung up, and it stopped working a few minutes after. I called again the next day, same rigamarole, it never started working, and they more or less said "Oh well"

 

I don't use the touch screen enough to care about returning it, but it's part of the reason I avold HP products like the plague.

[Needfuldoer]

I'm on team Dell. ProSupport is fantastic if you're willing to pay for it.

 

The last HP machines I had with any sort of warranty were a dv5000 laptop and a post-buyout Compaq. They were fine, I never had to call support about them.

[LAwLz]

Having been at the other end of the customer support businesses, let me tell you that customers are often idiots.

They exaggerate, lie, withhold information, try to cover up their own mistakes, refuse to do anything themselves like read the manual or basic troubleshooting, have unrealistic expectations, etc. They are also often very rude. 

 

 

So when you see someone talk shit about some companies customer service, take it with a massive shovel worth of salt. Chances are they spilled a drink over their PC, asked to have it replaced through the wrong channel (like calling the number for questions about invoices rather than technical support) and then got mad when asked "which lights turn on when you press the power button?" because company X should just send them a new PC right away.

Then when they complain on the forums they leave out those details, and get a bunch of likes from people who have been in the same situation.

 

 

I get especially worried when someone claims to have a lot of experience with support from different companies. Usually, big companies do not have that many defect products. If they did they would not be profitable. So when someone says they have needed to contact a lot of different companies chances are the customer is the issue, not the company. You'd have to be EXTREMELY unlucky to get defective products from several companies. 

[danalog]

Certain HP products are good (daily driving a z620 workstation for its reliability) but I can't say the same about their customer service. Their forums, however, are rather helpful. 

I was on the phone for an hour and finally hung up without my issue being solved of where to find the freaking SAS driver that wasn't on their download page. It's like 2 .INF files and a .CAB, how hard can it be? I literally gave them the model, serial, they tried to sell me a warranty on a 10 year old machine I'd already voided it on, then pointed me to 3 different download pages, 2 for the wrong product, where it wasn't there. I finally just got the chipset driver for another board and that worked fine.

The next time I had an HP question I went onto their forums to ask about an ancient Pentium 4 system needing a ROM update. Few minutes later, it was solved by someone who provided good instructions and a link to a downloads page.

[BiotechBen]

On 5/10/2022 at 1:33 PM, Needfuldoer said:

I'm on team Dell. ProSupport is fantastic if you're willing to pay for it.

 

The last HP machines I had with any sort of warranty were a dv5000 laptop and a post-buyout Compaq. They were fine, I never had to call support about them.

having dealt with Dell standard customer support for DOA (died withing 10 minutes of booting, CPU fried itself) they were super helpful once we got to talk to a tech, but the endless phone tree of transfers, and the fact that it sounded like the tech was somebody's personal cell phone at a busy open air market instead of a call center gave me some bad vibes. 

 

the other experience was with an old W7 Inspiron(1545?) that would eat HDDs at like one a year, other than that it was a great laptop. but Dell customer service was always ready to ship a new drive when it died.

 

On 5/10/2022 at 2:25 PM, Mel0nMan said:

Certain HP products are good (daily driving a z620 workstation for its reliability) but I can't say the same about their customer service. Their forums, however, are rather helpful. 

I was on the phone for an hour and finally hung up without my issue being solved of where to find the freaking SAS driver that wasn't on their download page. It's like 2 .INF files and a .CAB, how hard can it be? I literally gave them the model, serial, they tried to sell me a warranty on a 10 year old machine I'd already voided it on, then pointed me to 3 different download pages, 2 for the wrong product, where it wasn't there. I finally just got the chipset driver for another board and that worked fine.

The next time I had an HP question I went onto their forums to ask about an ancient Pentium 4 system needing a ROM update. Few minutes later, it was solved by someone who provided good instructions and a link to a downloads page.

I've literally had the exact opposite experience, the forums I have found to be either amazing or telling you to do something that cannot be done anymore or lead to a dead link. I hate phone calls, so I usually do live chat because things only go wrong outside of normal business hours. Drivers for nonstandard configs is something I also have frustrating experiences with. Had a bulldozer APU with crossfire graphics that had a proprietary driver and literally nobody at HP had any idea what I was talking about, called AMD to see if they could help and they very kindly informed me that that config was no longer supported and couldn't help.

 

On 5/10/2022 at 1:51 PM, LAwLz said:

Having been at the other end of the customer support businesses, let me tell you that customers are often idiots.

They exaggerate, lie, withhold information, try to cover up their own mistakes, refuse to do anything themselves like read the manual or basic troubleshooting, have unrealistic expectations, etc. They are also often very rude. 

 

 

So when you see someone talk shit about some companies customer service, take it with a massive shovel worth of salt. Chances are they spilled a drink over their PC, asked to have it replaced through the wrong channel (like calling the number for questions about invoices rather than technical support) and then got mad when asked "which lights turn on when you press the power button?" because company X should just send them a new PC right away.

Then when they complain on the forums they leave out those details, and get a bunch of likes from people who have been in the same situation.

 

 

I get especially worried when someone claims to have a lot of experience with support from different companies. Usually, big companies do not have that many defect products. If they did they would not be profitable. So when someone says they have needed to contact a lot of different companies chances are the customer is the issue, not the company. You'd have to be EXTREMELY unlucky to get defective products from several companies. 

The worst customer service I have come across with tech was Acer for 3 identical acer aspire laptops, only one of which was still working a year later. Mom's worked presumably because it was never updated or turned off, brother's lasted about 2 weeks after the warranty period expired (rarely updated), and mine one day just full inexplicable death. Would begin startup repair, then sit there for 30 min trying to fix itself, then report "catastrophic failure, return to manufacturer" and then turn off. Contacted support about it still being covered under warranty and we got a passive aggressive "well we can't determine whether you sabotaged it, and since you only have the limited warranty, that's something that is NOT covered. Buy a new laptop, a better more expensive one"

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Going to reference a comment a made yesterday on another thread about HP's support.

I've had nothing but the best support from HP's Elite Business Product support agents and on-site technicians. In fact I've always had the same 2 HP techs show up at my office for warranty calls so we know each other pretty well at this point. I would however only call HP for hardware related issues rather than software. It seems most support techs in the business are not good at providing support for driver or software related issues. Which sort of makes sense since you could be spending hours on the phone to diagnose something like that. Whereas hardware issues it's really just updating the BIOS and running diagnostic software. As I mentioned in that post, if you have a hardware issue, just use their UEFI Diagnostics tool and get a failure ID for the component in question. At that point it's pretty much approved with no further questions asked if the device is still under warranty. 

 

The weirdest I've had so far was Lenovo where they shipped me the part and had a contractor come in to do the install. But from what I've heard this is actually pretty common in the enterprise/business space as my HP buddies mentioned that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) does that. Which I've further learned is separate from the HP Inc. we are more familiar with. 

[BiotechBen]

1 hour ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Going to reference a comment a made yesterday on another thread about HP's support.

I've had nothing but the best support from HP's Elite Business Product support agents and on-site technicians. In fact I've always had the same 2 HP techs show up at my office for warranty calls so we know each other pretty well at this point. I would however only call HP for hardware related issues rather than software. It seems most support techs in the business are not good at providing support for driver or software related issues. Which sort of makes sense since you could be spending hours on the phone to diagnose something like that. Whereas hardware issues it's really just updating the BIOS and running diagnostic software. As I mentioned in that post, if you have a hardware issue, just use their UEFI Diagnostics tool and get a failure ID for the component in question. At that point it's pretty much approved with no further questions asked if the device is still under warranty. 

 

The weirdest I've had so far was Lenovo where they shipped me the part and had a contractor come in to do the install. But from what I've heard this is actually pretty common in the enterprise/business space as my HP buddies mentioned that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) does that. Which I've further learned is separate from the HP Inc. we are more familiar with. 

Like this guy at Microcenter when I told him they overnight everything for me was flabbergasted, like straight up disbelief. If there is one thing I have learned from being in sales and dealing with customer support: be assertive, confident, and polite. Don't take a dismissive no for an answer, and keep them in the line until you get a legitimate answer to "how are we going to resolve this problem?"