The Worst Customer Support Call I’ve Ever Had

Several months ago I decided to upgrade my HP Media Center to Vista. It worked ok, but the fan kicked on a lot and was very loud, had trouble turning off / going to standby, etc. No problem, I thought, I’ll just take it back to XP using the official “HP Recovery Media”.

After putting it off for a while, I decided to jump on it today. I popped my recovery DVD in and rebooted, but was quickly met with an error saying that the System Recovery CDs did not support my particular model. Well, HP must have shipped me the wrong set of recovery DVDs. I called HP and explained my problem.

I should have never mentioned that I had upgraded to Vista.

The agent I spoke to was stuck on the fact that I had upgraded the Media Center to Vista and said that the support call would have to be charged in order to help me. I disagreed with him pointing out that Vista had nothing to do with it – the recovery media didn’t work. That was to no avail – there was no way he was going to help me without charging me the standard support rate. There was no way I was going to pay $100 +  for something that was not my fault. I could have had an empty harddrive in there for all he was concerned – the recovery dvd should work regardless. I was fine paying for shipping charges and maybe even for the replacement DVD, but I was not going to pay for the support call because I had upgraded a machine to Vista. The recovery media they shipped me should work and it didn’t – period.

Here is where it gets interesting:

No problem, I thought, I’ll just ask him to escalate the call to someone who really understands what is going on here and will help me. He REFUSED to escalate it to his supervisor. That’s right – REFUSED. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never had a customer support person refuse to escalate a call to their supervisor. Not believing what I was hearing, we argued back and forth for a few minutes. Fine, “transfer me to another agent, ” I finally told him. Again, he refused to transfer me to another agent.

I was stuck. I couldn’t recover my HP Media Center using their recovery media, the HP Customer Support rep wouldn’t help me without charging me for the call, and he wouldn’t escalate or transfer the call. What a way to treat a customer.

So, I hung up and called back. I explained the EXACT same situation to the next support rep. He said “No problem, I’ll transfer you to another department, and they’ll ship you out a new DVD. You’ll just need to pay the shipping charges.” Finally!  My DVD will be here tomorrow.

Moral of the story – don’t give up. If you get the customer support rep for you know where, call back and don’t take no for an answer.

HP – you need to find out why customer support reps are refusing to escalate calls to their supervisor. That should not be happening.