Notebook Customer Support and User Satisfaction Survey Results

When you buy a laptop computer it's all to easy to get caught up in getting the best specs, latest features and best lookingmachine for the most reasonable price you can. There's one thing people often forget when buying a notebook though. Service and support are as important as specs and features, you're buying more than a product when you buy a laptop. You're also buying into a company and trusting they'll provide you with a quality working product, and if not initially, they'll see to it that you are as soon as possible. But not all companies are equal when it comes to service and support. According to a recent survey by PCWorld EMachines, IBM and Apple brands are best with support, while Sony and HP sit in the cellar.

PCWorld teamed up with rating agencies Lynd Bacon & Associates and Research Resultsto collect its readers opinions between April and August of this year and gather feedback on products they had purchased.

Key Reasons for Satisfaction with service and support:

• Customers were able to communicate with a service representative that actually worked directly for the PC manufacturer rather than being a 3rd party outsourced employee that followed a script.
• Service representatives were able to make their own decisions on how to best help the customer.
• Service representatives were well informed about all of the companies products and knew them inside and out.
• Problems were resolved after the first call

Key Reasons for Disatisfaction with service and support:

• Major component malfunction such as graphics processor, CPU or motherboard that causednotebook to be inoperable upon arrival.
• Slight problem such as dead-pixels on LCD screen that were detected upon arrival of the notebook.
• Long hold times on the phone to tech support
• Hard to understand tech support while on the phone or support simply ran through a script and did not resolve the problem.
• Problem was not resolved after theseveral attempts at phone support, oreven after shipping the product back.

According to survey results from PCWorld, 29% of Sony owners reported some type of hardware or software problems with notebooks they purchased. Only 16% of Apple notebook buyers reported hardware or software problems. Furthermore, 23% of Sony buyers who contacted tech-support to try and resolve their problem, indicated that their problem was just simply never solved. The average for all company tech support simply not being able to resolve a problem is 14%, so Sony was quite a bit above that.

HP and Compaq also faired poorly being just slightly above Sony in their numbers.

IBM was right behind EMachines at the top of customer satisfaction. The interesting thing to observe with IBM going forward is if Lenovo (Chinese company), who recently bought out the IBM PC business unit, will be able to maintain the customer support levels. If IBM support slips during the transition to Lenovo, it's sure to hurt their business.

Dell also faired well in the survey. Consumers were generally fairly happy with Dell. Dell also recently did well in a survey conductedby Technology Business Research (TBR). TBR surveyedIT managers in large businesses. The third-quarter result survey by TBR gave Dell the highest satisfaction rating among the world's top three PC manufacturers. HP scored 81.95 for the period, while IBM came in third with 81.66, so Dell was tops for business buyer satisfaction.

More: PCWorld Readers Survey of satisfaction with notebook purchase

More: Dell beats HP and IBM for customer support andsatisfaction in large business

 

Looks like my assets go much against this survey. Never had a problem with any of my laptops which happen to be the two kinds they place at the bottom. Am I just some emitter of good karma or is there some truth to my claims?

That doesn't matter as much as something I find a lot more suspicious about the survey though. Dell computers have this wonderful penchant for making "good first impressions." Dells almost never come broken. They take time to manifest their problems. It would have been more accurate like some other surveys to poll users who've owned the notebook for around a year to report their satisfaction. At that point, I'd almost guarantee that Dell would be at the bottom.

The same goes for some other brands too like Toshiba. They start out really fine, but it just takes a little time, and they'll manifest their problems too. I can't say any of this definitively, but having a nice group of 500 people who all own laptops can't lie can it?

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Compaq Presario 2800T
Pentium 4-M 1.6 GHz - 15" UXGA
512 MB RAM - 40 GB (5400 rpm)
ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 64 MB

 

Eliwood, the title of that survey should have told you that the results are inaccurate because only a specific demographic group is included: the readers of PC World. The first step in creating a scientifically accurate and statistically meaningful survey is to include all kinds of samples from different demographic backgrounds. In here, while the readers of PC World can indeed include people of any age, race, job, etc., the fact that they all read PC World is a common ground for them. Consequently, any non-reader's experiences, which could be a lot or exactly the demographic group that purchase lots of Sony or Compaq, are not reflected in the results. It's just like polling only Republicans on whether they support Bush or Kerry.

Personally, there are three VAIO laptops and another three Sony electronics in my house. They never gave me technical problems that require me to call Sony support. The only time I called Sony Technical Support is for the issue of an e-coupon of my product -- I don't know why this is not a Sale Support or whatever. The thing I like and don't like is that the automatic response will tell you to call back later because the expected wait time is too long then hang up. I think they may have gone for lunch and just turn that thing on because I waited for less than 5 minutes on the call that eventually got through.[ ] Anyway, I got my coupon no problem after I talked to the support lady.

Oh well, just another of my rant about the stupidity of "media polls". Thank God the TV channels now at least have the decency of saying that any of their polls is not scientific after the 2000 election debacle.

 

You guys are both right, even though PCWorld portrayed this result as being scientific, you can't take a subset of any group and allow them to represent a whole. A truly scientific survey would have been to randomly call different zip code areas of the U.S. and survey people.

btw, my views on IBM are supported by this poll. Meanwhile, the Inspiron 8200 laptop I bought 2-years ago from Dell was a disaster after 12 months. Motherboard went kapput right after the warranty ended.

 

I'm a subscriber of PC world, and I often do not agree with what PC worlds report (like the ranking of computers in which their benchmark score is just different by one or two points out of 100 points, which seems meaningless).

However, when I saw this survey result, it made sense to me based on my experience. I've had two IBM laptops. When the second one, T30 had problems, I was satisfied with how the problems were solved: from the phone call to shipping for fixing the problem.

My wife has a sony laptop and my friend has a sony laptop. They had a horrible customer experience with Sony: how long it takes to talk to a customer rep., and Sony's refusal to fix the laptop: the early version of Vaio using the desktop processor had poor ventilation problems. The temperature was reaching over 70 degree in Celcius. Well, sony's reponse was CPU speed would step down to reduce temperature. Ummm... He wanted to take advantage of fast desktop CPU, and he had to buy a cooling fan, but this doesn't work very well either.

I know the survey done in PC world is not statistically valid without conditioning on other variables: from the selection bias to the number of respondents (PC world doesn't say how many reponses they've got. I am pretty sure it's a small number. Otherwise, they must have reported it.). But, still, I do pretty agree with the survey results: IBM on top and Sony at the bottom.

 

I think IBM has been recognized in enough inaccurate surveys that you can consider them to be top dog no problem, at least that's how I view them in the area of support. I am not so sure about the quality and reliablity, though, as I think they are over-hyped (not that they are not good, just not significantly better than other brands). In any event, Lenovo is taking over and we will just have to wait and see what happens.

For the rest of the pack, some rise some drop, some rise sometimes but drop other times. I really don't think anyone offers that much of an advantage over the others (or anyone really bottoms) as any "analyses" on this kind of inaccurate surveys have hyped.[:I]

 

I was just about to pull the trigger on an HP zd7000 purchase when the survey came out. I have had 4 Dells with absolutely no problems. I was swayed to the HP because of the full size keyboard. Now I don't know what to do. I had an HP years ago which was a disaster, but 2 compaqs have been good, also in the previous century. Now I am leaning back to a Dell 9200 with a USB 10 keypad. I am not going crazy by contemplating a lugabout but my needs have changed. Also does anyone have an idea on when Compaq will introduce the new 17 in. Any thoughts?