I ve heard in the community over the last few weeks a growing concern about various aspects of HP s products and service/support. A large amount of this is coming from the Australian partner community. I ve taken a number of those concerns direct to HP for their input and they are mobilising a team to better understand and address the issues. In the interim, can I ask that people that have issues get their facts together for me. HP will want to understand things like the problems experienced, specific details such as case numbers, dates of issues and the like. If you can get these things together and email them to me via this link I ll act as a funnel to HP in the short term to try to help them better understand the scope of the problem and hopefully get to a positive outcome for us all.
enough said
but since you asked…
Support has steadily gotten worse over the past 3 years. I dread ever having to call with support issues.
Quality on printers vary widely with no way to tell what model is better.
marketing docs are terrible in regards to technical specs. It’s hard to accuratly decide what a client needs.
Had no problems…
?
Sorry I haven’t kept case numbers etc but here are a few experiences. I have been instructed by 3 clients not to give them quotes on HP laptops anymore due to faults with existing equipment and then not receiving satisfactory service. A server one day old fails and HP make multiple visits with wrong parts before the machine is repaired 5 days later. I have found the staff in Australia to be unhelpful, in fact probably the worst I have come across in the IT industry.
Totally hopeless offshore call centre, by far the worst ever.
When I call up and say I am technical and already done a lot of troubleshooting I don’t want to hear them turning pages and saying “have you tried turning it off and on”
U stayed on the phone the last time just to see how long it would take, literally an hour and a half later we were still turning pages and going through basic support steps.
I don’t buy HP anymore, nothing to do with the hardware that’s good, decision based totally on the rubbish support.
30 minutes install of these “drivers” and an hour to uninstall?
So we’re not the only ones suffering?
I’ve been selling HP for 15 years (and Compaq for 18). I always told my client base that HP/Compaq could be relied upon for their after sales service. I cannot say that now.
Their warranty support is now a shocker. They simply don’t trust their so called reseller “partners” to have diagnosed the issue and send someone on site quickly like they used to.
I am close to giving up on HP – even their ProLiant servers – a brand at one stage I would have almost gone to war to support.
And it saddens me to say they won’t listen. We have a PAM but he adds no value and we have to fight every warranty battle on our own. I’m at the stage where for my clients’ sake, we will need to buy HP parts from Grays Online and do warranty jobs ourselves, OR start building our own “NetCare” servers. Anyone know of a good clone server brand?
Well, apart from an offshore, difficult to understand centre, their reponse has been great for me.
Example, recently had LTO1 tape drive failure. I know the usually upgrade firmware, check driver stuff they force you thru so i did it and was prepared. Had download the HP tape diagnostics software so while on phone ran test and emailed results. next day replacement tape drive arrived.
I and my client were very happy. ALL support centres force you thru the usual garbage at beginning so was prepared and YES I was online for about 1 hour running tests and YES some were tests i had already run.
we do that to our own clients so i was happy to the way it was handled.
1) It took HP 4 returns to actually fix a laptop. They refused to listen to what I said the problem was – in the end they sent a tech out and I had to explain to him the problem and then make sure he didn’t leave utnil it was fixed!
2) Its too hard to spec out the machines. I look at the ditributor and then can’t find the equivalent machine / part on HP’s website or vice versa. The same thing happened with printers an hour ago. I got fed up with it and quoted another brand.
3) Not enough options on their servers (ie can’t add a dual head video card to certain models).
a few years ago they began to concentrate their european support activities in bulgaria. now almost every hp product is supported from their global delivery center they established there.
and you can and will experience every possible problem you can with the most worst support team you can imagine.
a lot of people complained about the situation in the last years, my own company eg about 10 times, which costs time, as they pretend to help and ask for a lot of details every time, but they were not worth the effort as nothing ever changed. since they opened their global delivery center they partly admit problems, announce improvements, but as said, nothing changed.
it is a pity to have “lost” proliant-servers.
in our experience, ibm is much more expensive, but offers better support, dell is not a vendor you can earn money with if you are a reseller, but they are usually close to premium support. still, we have not yet found a server you can compare to hp’s proliants.
We have owned 3 HP printers, two low end printers and one very pricey one. We now own an HP Media System PC which has given us problems since the first few months we owned it. after over a year of fiddling with it, recently got the media center to work like it was supposed to but that lasted only a month or so, and now it is acting up. Tech support, as usual has been no help. As I read above, one tech was reading out of a manual, my wife new more about the Sonic DVD Burner than he did, etc. Recently when my wife called for tech support they sold her a one year contract that she thought would offer her help on the kind of problem she called in on. One tech support person talked on the phone for several hours but nothing was accomplished. The next day she talked to one or more people told her she would have to pay more for continued tech support. When she called to cancel the service she had paid for a few days before, I was sitting next to her, and I could tell that whoever she was talking to was frustrating her even more. I overheard her say that this would be the last HP product we would ever buy. Big surprise (NOT)!
Aside from personal experience, Consumer reports shows that their readers rates tech support for PCs on HP models to be the lowest of any manufacturer rated. And here is a juicy tidbit from the Better Business Bureau Online. The total number of complaints registered against hp.com was listed as 6387 over the last 36 months. In other words, they have averaged over 2,000 complaints per year for the last 3 years.