Open letter to Hewlett Packard's President Hurd
Dear Mr. Hurd,
I have found your Pavillion dv9700 series laptop overall to be well made and to meet my needs as a small businessman very well. The one minor exception has been the USB ports, which should be a minor inconvenience, but due to the consistent difficulties I have experienced with your support (chat and phone), this has become a seriously troubling issue.
Three times now I have tried to use your support to fix my issue. Each time I was left with no solutions, no ability to escalate the issue to someone with more expertise, and it appears that the agent simply disconnected when I asked to escalate (though it could have been a fault in the chat client).
Each time the agent seemed to have little understanding of my issue, of the hardware, of the operating system or of the English language. As a professional who sets up service desks for a living, the appearance I have been given is of an outsourced help desk run by inexperienced ESL agents who are giving directions from decision tree software.
While this can be functional for basic issues, customers like myself with more complex issues are left very frustrated when they are told there is no ability to escalate to a more knowledgeable agent. It doesn't help either to be presented with directions like this: "Kelly, Please uninstall the drivers from device manager which drivers are not installed in the device." Not only is this barely comprehensible, but it shows a complete lack of understanding of the issue, which is that Vista is not finding or installing drivers for my USB devices. (This was followed by having me try to use Recovery Manager to re-install drivers for the external device, again showing a lack of understanding of the issue.)
In summary, after a total of several hours of using your support options, both self-service, phone and chat, I am left with no solutions, a great deal of frustration and the impression that your help desk has no function beyond walking customers through the website support data. I have had respect for Hewlett Packard for several decades of using your products, from printers to servers, and I hope this will letter will help fix what I see as a serious deficiency in the support of those products.
Thank you for your time and consideration,
Kelly Logan
I have found your Pavillion dv9700 series laptop overall to be well made and to meet my needs as a small businessman very well. The one minor exception has been the USB ports, which should be a minor inconvenience, but due to the consistent difficulties I have experienced with your support (chat and phone), this has become a seriously troubling issue.
Three times now I have tried to use your support to fix my issue. Each time I was left with no solutions, no ability to escalate the issue to someone with more expertise, and it appears that the agent simply disconnected when I asked to escalate (though it could have been a fault in the chat client).
Each time the agent seemed to have little understanding of my issue, of the hardware, of the operating system or of the English language. As a professional who sets up service desks for a living, the appearance I have been given is of an outsourced help desk run by inexperienced ESL agents who are giving directions from decision tree software.
While this can be functional for basic issues, customers like myself with more complex issues are left very frustrated when they are told there is no ability to escalate to a more knowledgeable agent. It doesn't help either to be presented with directions like this: "Kelly, Please uninstall the drivers from device manager which drivers are not installed in the device." Not only is this barely comprehensible, but it shows a complete lack of understanding of the issue, which is that Vista is not finding or installing drivers for my USB devices. (This was followed by having me try to use Recovery Manager to re-install drivers for the external device, again showing a lack of understanding of the issue.)
In summary, after a total of several hours of using your support options, both self-service, phone and chat, I am left with no solutions, a great deal of frustration and the impression that your help desk has no function beyond walking customers through the website support data. I have had respect for Hewlett Packard for several decades of using your products, from printers to servers, and I hope this will letter will help fix what I see as a serious deficiency in the support of those products.
Thank you for your time and consideration,
Kelly Logan