IBM Tech Support experience

After a lot of hemming and hawing I recently purchased an IBM T series notebook for law school, complete with 3 year warranty. Part of the reason I chose IBM was their stellar reputation for reliability and tech support quality.

Well, about a month and a half after I got my thinkpad, and the day before classes were to start, my hard drive died, taking my full weeks worth of case briefs with it. After cursing, screaming, trying to reboot about 20 times, I gave up and called tech support.

From the moment I dialled till I talked to the first rep was around 5-10 min, and considering this was labor day I was pretty impressed. The guy walked me through a few basic things to make sure it really was a hardware problem, and then told me that they'd mail a drive to the local tech, and he'd come to my house to fix it, according to the phone tech, this would take about 2-3 DAYS. At this point I was in near shock, I've dealt with tech support for most of the major manufacturers, and I've never had the first rep I talked to be friendly, competent, and willing to do what it takes to resolve the problem, let alone offer to send a tech to my house inside of a week.

Unfortunately the phone-rep's computer crashed several times as he was processing my order. This is the part where the whole thing takes on an almost farcical quality, and up to this point IBM had 5/5 stars. The phone-rep took all my information, and told me that everything was all set. Well, the rest of the week went by, and I hadn't heard anything. I figured they were just busy. But after the next week also passed with no word from IBM, I got a little worried, and so on the second monday after my first call, I called them at around 3pm.

This time I was on hold for about 10 minutes, still a very brief time in my opinion. I gave the first rep my ticket number, and she immediately transferred me to hardware support. The hardware support guy opened the ticket and immediately said that something was odd. Apparently my order had been completed, but not submitted, due to the phone-reps technical difficulties. We redid everything, and put in a whole new order. The IBM tech did not confirm my address though, because he was copying from the old order.

The next day when I got home from classes, my laptop was fixed, IBM had managed to get a tech to my home by roughly 10:30 am, the day after I called. The only hitch was they got my address completely wrong, and since I live way out in the boonies, the tech drove around completely lost for a while. The other bad part was that they had also shipped the recovery CD's overnight to a non-existant address, so I didn't actually get to do anything with my fixed laptop for another day and a half, because I had to call DHL and give them the correct address.

Over all I give IBM very high marks, and their reps were always a pleasure to deal with, although there were a few problems, they did their best to resolve them quickly and efficiently, and the turn around time once they processed the order was simply astounding.

 

first hand accounts of tech support like this are important. I saw the subject and read the first paragraph you wrote and prepared myself for a rant against IBM as people *usually* only post to complain. But this is a good story and that's fantastic turnaround by IBM, and the logistical hiccups with address and whatever are unavoidable human errors. Now, the fact the drive failed is dissapointing and I've heard one too many stories of problems with IBM hard drives (they generally use Hitachi hard drives) and had my own painful experience with a ThinkPad T22 hard drive failing on me. So kudos to the tech support and the outstanding effort there, but don't you just wish the hard drive had never let you down in the first place. I'm sure both parties do.

 

They have always picked up and have always resolved issues quickly whien I have called.

 

Yeah, sure I wish the drive hadn't failed, particularly when it did, and before I had a chance to back up a weeks worth of work, but the lack of backups is my fault, not IBM's, and the drive did give a few warning signs before it croaked, so I have no excuse for not backing up.

On the other hand the rest of the laptop is superb, quiet fan, sturdy elegant construction, good speed, good battery life, beautiful screen. Overall, I don't have much in the way of complaints.