A long write-up of my XoticPC experience

To start it off, my situation was a bit complicated by the fact that I was not the one paying for the laptop. I was fortunate enough to be a part of a program within a fairly large organisation that agreed to purchase it for me, which however created a surprising amount of hold-ups during the whole process. My initial order was a Sager NP8672-S, placed 8/24/2015. The initial idea was to pay by check (to get the 3% discount) and to speed up the rather ridiculous wait time for the clearing of the check (which is an information somewhat hidden from immediate access) cover it with my own debit card. I explained the whole ordering/payment process to the program coordinator and she agreed to do it this way, even though it deviated from their standard procedure. When I checked the website 2 days after placing the order, Sager NP8672-S was nowhere to be found. After some searching online I found out that the model got discontinued, and in a phone call with an Xotic rep I was told that they likely won't be able to fulfill any order placed after 8/22. Instead of a notice about this however, I got an order confirmation and my order was updated to processing on 8/25. It took them a week to actually email me that the order cannot be fulfilled.

So I had explain the whole situation to our coordinator, get her to cancel the check and place a new order for the 15.6" version of the laptop. This time, we decided to forego the discount and go for the speed and convenience of a credit card payment. Big mistake. Another piece of information that to my knowledge is actually not listed anywhere is that xoticPC require a phone verification of the order. With the cardholder. Which in our case was the vice president of the organisation, who does not deal with direct purchases at all. So yeah, Susan S. sent me a confusing email (a WEEK after placing the order) that she started processing the order and needs a phone call from me to verify it, after which she proceeded to ignore all my phone calls and emails for the next day. I was calling them about every hour during your opening time and NOBODY was picking up. When I finally reached Susan, she told me the only way to proceed with the order is to bother the program coordinator to bother the vice president to call her directly. Given the chance of Susan picking up being about 1 in 50, and the fact that this has already taken another WEEK and meanwhile the model I ordered was again discontinued I was getting pretty frustrated.

Fortunately though, the situation got resolved before all of the Sagers disappeared and the actual build time by Sager was suprisingly fast.

I got the PC roughly 3 weeks after I placed the order and loved it ever since I first turned it on.

About a month and a half of use later, the fingerprint reader started to act up. This progressively got worse until it stopped working altogether or got a correct read about 1 in 20 tries. Later I installed Office2016 and started experiencing BSODs that are documented in a discussion thread these forums. The fix that was suggested was updating BIOS, which I couldn't find on xoticPC's website so I decided to contact the advertised tech support.

After some back and forth (with some delays in communication) I was told that a new BIOS does not exist; and to try to reinstall Windows. In the meanwhile the laptop started crashing upon waking from hibernation to which Eric F. responded with opening a RMA with Sager, without me asking him to or even indicating that it's what I'd like to do. Windows reinstallation fixed the hibernation problem but not the Office2016 or the fingerprint reader (which after some ups and downs and different driver tests became reverted back to 1-in-20 chance). I finally decided that when I wanted a laptop with a fingerprint reader, it may be worth the wait for the reader to actually work and sent the laptop - my only home PC on which I do majority of work - for RMA.

After two weeks got the PC back and had the chance to try it out. To be honest, I'm a bit confused about what happened. The fingerprint reader still does not work. Absolutely no change in its behavior. My own or anybody else's fingers. I thought it was faulty and needed to be replaced. That was in the end the major reason why I even sent it in. One of the top reasons why I picked this model is the built in fingerprint scanner, which now, after all the RMA hassles still doesn't work properly. The Office2016 issue seems to have been resolved with the BIOS update, but that's what I suspected straight from the start and could have done myself, but I was told that there was no BIOS update from Sager. I really am not sure how much of the XoticPC difference and the "Extreme QA testing by dedicated technicians" advertised on their site actually happened, but in the end it seems that I gave up my primary mean of getting work done at home for two weeks for no reason.

In general and short my whole experience with XoticPC was a huge disappointment. The payment process was incredibly convoluted and delayed my order by at least a week and a half, the sales staff was completely unresponsive during main opening hours, tech staff were not really helpful, and the RMA at Sager did not fix the major problem.

When deciding which company to pick I read a bunch of similar negative experiences, but stupidly enough I thought they were an exception and wouldn't happen to me. Unfortunately either I was another of those exceptions, or these experiences are fairly common. Since I don't really see anything left for me to do I think I can at least try to prevent others from making the same mistake.

PS: All this was sent 18 days ago to Tanner M. as a response to his system follow-up email where he asked me about my experiences with the PC and xoticPC on the whole. Try and guess what kind of response I got. None.

UPDATE: XoticPC reached out to me to deal with the situation. According to Pat here they have reworked their online ordering process and hired more sales reps to prevent the unresponsiveness I experienced, so hopefully new customers will not have to go through the same frustrations as I did. Tanner suggested to expedite a second RMA for me which I will have to leave for later due to my current workload and offered to send me an external fingerprint reader, resolving most of my current problems.
With the most recent interactions in mind, I think XoticPC do care about their customers even despite some potential frustrations and slip-ups.

 

I'm sorry about the issues you have had so far with your computer, and I'll be glad to help out. This isn't something we like to see happen at all, and I'll do what I can for you.

We do listen to the feedback, and try to improve based on what we hear from our customers. Since you've purchase your system, we have hired on more sales staff to help answer calls and chats, and get our email response time. We've also been hiring more service staff as well to help when issues come up. Generally when we aren't reachable like that, is has been due to the fact that we've all been on the phones. We've also replaced the website and ordering system since then as well, to be much more efficient for processing payments and getting orders moving along quicker. These are all points we have been working on. Normally Tanner is very quick to respond to messages when they come through, I'm not sure what happened there, but I can follow up with him to see what might have happened. As for the testing, we do make sure everything is working before anything is shipped. We would rather delay an order to make sure it is functioning before it ships out, as we know nobody wants to have to ship a computer back.

As for the RMA, I can check in to what we can do for you for any system issues you are still having. If you can please email me or message me with the name that was on the order or the email address it was ordered under, I'll be glad to see what I can do for you, so we can help get your system working as you would expect it to be. Please, let me know what I can do for you. Thanks.

 

I tried to call xotic a few months ago ...several times, but no response. Chat got a few questions answered, but then I was dropped. So I did a little due diligence research which convinced me to delete any further consideration for this supplier.

 

As I have mentioned, we have more people in sales now than we previously did, to be able to help out quicker and with less missed calls and chats. We've also changed our chat host as well in the last few months, and this one seems to be more stable (the old one would drop people randomly depending on broswer sometimes).

If anybody ever needs help with anything, please reach out to me directly, or Alex, and we'll be glad to help out.

 

Thank you at least for acknowledging my situation and trying to prevent future cases. You, Alex, and some of your online chat reps seem to be an exception that knows how to treat people and respond.
I got the email from Tanner, but at this point, I don't really know what can be done. I can't afford to send the laptop away for another 1.5-2 weeks. If you have any suggestions or ideas, I'm all ears.

 

Looks like Tanner is reaching out to Sager to see what we might be able to do for you at this point, and he should be contacting you when he has some more information about that. If you can think of anything we might be able to do to help, just let one of us know and we'll check in to it.

 

UPDATE: XoticPC reached out to me to deal with the situation. According to Pat here they have reworked their online ordering process and hired more sales reps to prevent the unresponsiveness I experienced, so hopefully new customers will not have to go through the same frustrations as I did. Tanner suggested to expedite a second RMA for me which I will have to leave for later due to my current workload and offered to send me an external fingerprint reader, resolving most of my current problems.
With the most recent interactions in mind, I think XoticPC do care about their customers even despite some potential frustrations and slip-ups.

 

We do care about our customers, and I'm glad to see that things have been getting better while we try to take care of the issues on your system. As always, if anybody reading the forum has questions or issues, please reach out to me directly (or that Alex guy), and we'll be glad to help out.