A Glimpse into the Lenovo Support Hierarchy

This is my story of calls, critical lists and how to speed up your ship time (in theory)...

So, let me just prequel this by saying that I ordered an EPP z61t on june 20th, it was an open bay config with the bare essentials. It never shipped. I am not affiliated with, knowledgable of or in any way speaking on behalf of lenovo etc etc etc. I am posting this for those who are truly in a rush, not for those who simply want to work the system. As with anything, if you abuse it, you lose it. PLEASE dont exploit anything you may learn here just because you can. (I know, I am foolish to believe that, but at least I said it)

The week before my ship date (estimated at july 12th), I begin calling lenovo (both the regular customer service line and the EPP service line...the EPP line rings to an agent MUCH faster and they only ask for an EPP number half the time) as a few others had seen their z61t orders pushed back and I was up against a deadline and a flight out of the country for a year - thus making my on-time shipment essential.

from multiple calls, 3 absent call-backs and a fair bit of pissy-ness from my side, as far as I can tell there are 3 levels of order priority in the Lenovo system.

• Regular - This is where you are put when you order, I dont think it is different for EPP/regular, everyone is the same.
• Critical List - Regular customer service has the ability to put your order on a "critical list" - essentially a priority list which is intended for people whose computers have missed their ship date and are validly needed urgently. They can put it on the crit list before you miss your ship date, but aren't supposed to.
• "Hot list" - This is as High as I managed to get, only Customer Relations (you have to get bumped up from customer support) can put you on this list and from what I was told "there is no higher power than this - you get the next part out of the warehouse"

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There are also 2 warehouses in the US-Lenovo system: China and North Carolina (which is also where customer relations is...customer support is in Toronto).

Your order will come from whichever one has the parts first. My understanding is that z61t's will primarily ship from China because they are so new, but I know some have come from NC as well. I dont know their relative sizes and capacities, but you can request that your computer ship from one or the other but it is very hard (from what I gather) to actually force it to ship from one or the other and it involves a fair bit of personal intervention on the part of your support person...so dont hold your breath

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Open bay systems "must ship with a majority of Lenovo parts" so they wont ship empty, but I think they might let you slip on one or two parts if you get high enough...they opted to upgrade my HDD (but didnt know if I would have to pay for it or not) rather than leave it empty...until I canceled my order that is.

They WILL NOT ship just the open bay computer, I tried and tried and tried, no go with 3 different people.

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the entire support, supply and build team are connected by internal IM, my finaly customer relations guy was talking with the supply guy while I was on the phone and managed to tell me exactly which parts were missing (the 40gb HDD and the wifi antenna) and what days they were due into the factory, what day the computer would be built, which factory and when it would ship (july 26th, july 27th, Shanghai, july 30th respectively)...so they CAN do it.

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Well, that is about as much as I know. I hope that it helps some of you. If this post is out of line, mods, please remove it and accept my appologies.

To all those who actually manage to get their computers, enjoy, to those who, like me, have to wait 1.5 months because they ran out of 40gb HDDs and little pieces of metal and wire, sucks to be us.

Have a great day
Twill