My lab needs a new printer. My boss wanted a color laser printer. I was supposed to find one. I don’t like HP but a lot of other labs had equivalent printers so we figured “the price is right, the specs are decent and apparently it works”. We even tested out one of the other labs’ printers. So I call HP to see if it works on Mac and windows. I talk to 3 different reps, each with a different answer. And they are misleading and relatively uninformed about the different printers they have on hand as I was asking questions on 3 different printers. So that was irritating. Oh and I was sent to the wrong departments a couple times too (note of irony, when I received the printer later, it had a huge mac sign on the side). When they sent me a quote, instead of sending me a quote for the printer I wanted, they sent me a quote for MULTIPLE printers, so to get the quoted price, I had to buy MANY printers. So I get the printer I want’s quote to the purchasing lady in our office. She tries to order it online, we can’t do it, HP’s site doesn’t work. So we have to do it by phone. Next week she calls me, exasperated, “Patrick, I-I can’t do this, these people are morons”. “What happened?!”. “Just come to the office”. So she tells me how they can’t get our address right after 3 times and after they did get it right, along with it they send an email saying “order canceled”. To this day they haven’t replied as to the status of our order or what went wrong or if we can order our printer from them. We ended up ordering the printer from elsewhere and I warned everyone to watch where the printer comes from and only to sign from this one company and not directly from HP. They ended up ripping us off by 100$. Printer comes a week later (was supposed to be there before the weekend -_-), I install it. I turn it on, I get an error message to reinstall the ink carts. So I do so. 10 times. Finally they’re all recognized. I still get a “printer error” that says “turn off and on and if it persists, contact HP”. YAY! I contact HP AGAIN. So I chat with this bitch with an attitude that responds every 3-4 minutes. I get tired of waiting around for responses to simple questions and do my job. Later on she gets pissed that MY answers and questions are lagging because I’m not sitting there immediately answering her and she gets pissed at having to repeat herself because I repeat my question because SHE IS NOT ANSWERING THE QUESTION. When I ask “if the servicing doesnt’ work, will HP replace the printer” and I can’t get a straight answer, I will ask variants of this question until I get a straight answer. This is a 1000 dollar printer. I don’t want it serviced on the first day of a 1 year warranty and have to keep pumping cash and time and effort into this piece of shit and people that take up after me when I leave will not know how to handle this. The conversation ends abruptly when I ask if I can call for a servicing tomorrow, she says yes, I say thank you good night and write HP customer service an email depicting the past events in particularly vitriolic language you are all familiar with, unleashing an eloquent fury onto HP and telling them its a pleasure to return the printer.
Sadly, I don’t have a copy of the actual email I sent em on hand (no swear words or direct insults!). I took out my big vocabulary and lambasted HP for the godawful treatment I got at the hands of their employees when trying to buy a printer that didn’t work. Here’s a recording of the message the guy left for me. I cut off the part where he leaves his phone number.
So out of curiosity, I called, got his voice box saying he was out til monday (I’m in Canada starting tonight when I leave at 9:15 PM). The number he leaves as an emergency contact is a guy in the server department who has no clue what to do about the situation or who I can contact. He gives me a random number like these people do all the time when you play phone tag. They give me YET ANOTHER number.
Where I live, when you have a problem with a company and you can’t solve with the company in a few calls, you can sue them. In more than 80% of the cases, the customer wins. There’s a law forbidding companies to put customers into that kind of stress. Another law states that you don’t even have to ask, deffective products must be replaced or refunded (if the deffect is discovered up to 90 days after you buy it). Companies who refuse to do so have to pay fines which in some cases reach what would be hundreds of thousands of dollars (my father once sued a shop for refusing to replace a deffective ink cartdrige, when they found out they’d be fined some 10k they refunded us and gave a few free cartdriges along with a letter saying “we’re so sorry please take the lawsuit out bla-bla-bla…”). Sales representatives are trained and are always the first, quickest ones to suggest a replacement.
This is a serious problem, not only for you but also for the company. If I were the guy in charge at HP, there’d be one or two dozen people being fired. When they tend to customers like that, sales tend drop. They took one week to make a 1k dollar sale that could have been done in a few minutes. That’s the lowest productivity I’ve ever read about in a sales departmant.
I hope HP will give you a functional printer now. But I’m wondering why a Image and Printing Specialist was the one to call you… Shouldn’t it be a sales representative, or a manager/director? Or is it another of HP’s attitude flaws?
My new computer is an HP (well, technically a Compaq). It’s been incredible so far. All of my friends had previously bought Compaq laptops, so I decided to follow suit after seeing how good theirs were. I called HP to order it, and they were pretty accommodating to me, but I assume that’s because the first thing I said to them was “I want a laptop, and I’m willing to spend $3000 right now.”
However, their customer service department is a bunch of f’ing clowns. Working in PC repair myself, I constantly have to call HP (and the other big PC companies, Gateway, Sony, and Toshiba) to get them to pay us for any in-store repairs we perform under their manufacturer’s warranty. On more than one occasion, I’ve had an hp representative tell me that their “ONE YEAR MANUFACTURER’S WARRANTY” did not in fact last one year, but rather it only lasted 90 days. When I asked him why it was called a “ONE YEAR MANUFACTURER’S WARRANTY,” he said he’d check, put me on hold, and then hung up on me. Simply stunning.
Nope, I heard plenty of those since I did a job for a few weeks at ####, and I hear several of those from ### and ####… My dad has a Great email Arcive of messages of that, all to/from him. My Personal Favourate E-mail in this catorgry is Basicly “RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: What do want this system to do, so I can Tell the Progammers what to do!/Min. Spec Req Needed” Even worse I hear It’s going on, And they’ve just started Coding. The system should of been Made before they brought a American/English and Sweish companies in to a British company project. (Made worse that said Britsh Company out sorced the skills in to said American/English Company) (One said company is currently has a Tour de France Team)
BN
I had to add some blanks for Liable/slander pretection
Yes, I do. Hahahahah that guy seemed so nervous. It was like he thinks he’s dealing with a madman or something. You definately intimidated him. His tone of voice also sounded like he really wants to set you up with a sweet deal so you don’t buy from someone else.
Lol. When I went laptop shopping the other day I looked at the sales guy and asked him “Do Compaq laptops suck as much as the old compaq desktops? Because they sucked some cock” and he just looked at me and was like “…no, they’re pretty much the same as an hp laptop…”
“…no, they’re pretty much the same as an hp laptop…”
I hope this thread has helped narrow down your search, lol.
Yeah , usually a company provides incentives in these kinds of situations when they set something up a certain way. However, this being a printer costing hundreds upon hundreds of dollars, I don’t quite know what to expect from HP. If they slash off a few hundred bucks, it’ll be interesting. Otherwise, not really.