Beware of Empty Promises
Late this week we had a new customer come and see us who was visibly upset. They had purchased a new desktop PC, a new laptop and a heap of other white goods from a local retailer. The same retailer had recommended an installer for the white goods and a local computer support company for data transfer and on site setup of the PC’s. The task at hand was not at all complex however it soon proved to be very difficult.
On the air-conditioner side, for the last month the recommended installer was always ‘too busy’ and a different installer was not able to be found. Other retail outlets offered ‘their installers’ but only if they sold the original product – which I think is fair enough. So after a month of sweating it out the original retailer had to offer to take the product back. A similar failure occurred with the PC’s.
In this case the customer had previously only used the one desktop PC – which was not healthy but was still working. They simply wanted all of their information copied from this old PC to both the new desktop and the new laptop – and this was only Word documents, some Excel spreadsheets and a few photos. There were no emails to worry about, no accounting packages, no family trees, no customer databases, no music or movies & no special software whatsoever. They also wanted the new PC’s to have a few familiar traits to the old PC – such as being able to use Google as a search engine.
What happened over the last month was that the recommended IT support company were only too happy to take the customers money for their part of the deal (around $500) but they fell short on delivering. In the case of the laptop, only around half of the customers data was transferred and amongst other things that didn’t work properly the customer was told that they ‘had to use Bing as the web search engine’ – a total furphy.
Further to this the customer had been ‘bounced’ back-and-forth between the retailer and the IT support company to the point that no-one was listening to them anymore and further money was required if they wanted further help. There was little point in calling the incompetent support company so they called the retailer from our office, they were still getting bamboozled with technical lies. We helped out here – which finally put the retailer on the back foot to the point that they offered to take both PC’s back.
By Tuesday the customer will have two new PC’s from us – with all of their data and with the simple settings that they have asked for. It remains to be seen whether they get any of the wasted $500 labour charges back however they will never get back the last months’ worth of lost productivity, stress and tears.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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