This is a tale of woe. I am not especially complaining about a poor product although that is bad enough. The HP Pavilion tx1350ee laptop computer I bought last November has suffered from three major problems in its short life. A motherboard has burned out twice, its radio/bluetooth transmitter has failed twice and now it is totally inaccessible for another unfathomable reason.
My gripe is that each time I had a problem I have had a battle with HP’s after sales service to get them to honour the international warranty that comes with the computer.
I don’t intend to set out every single battle I have gone through since last November but I am publishing here the second of two letters I have written to the company over the last three weeks or so. If HP wants to respond to my letters by way of a comment here I will publish it without any editing whilst retaining the full right of reply.
Let me tell you what has happened as a result of these letters before you read them. Following my first letter I received a call from the Customer Services Department. They acknowledged the receipt of my letter and told me they were to send me a recovery CD/DVD in an attempt to solve my problem. They called over a week after I sent my letter and almost two weeks before I wrote my second letter as a result of not having received any CD/DVD.
Today, the day after I posted my second letter, I received another call from the Customer Services Department. In that call they asked me if I had received the disc. I said no. Then I told him I had written another letter to their Director and was considering legal action to recover my losses following their failure to apply the conditions of their warranty.
Well, here is the second letter:
Dear Sir,
On 29th September I wrote to you telling you that I was at the end of my tether.
I explained how my HP Pavilion tx1350ee laptop had stopped working and that I was unable to resolve the problem on my own. I also outlined the entire day that I wasted in trying to get any sense out of your after sales service people. I went round and round in circles trying to get someone to help me but ended up in long queues on the telephone: of course I was paying heavily per minute for these calls and a cynic would accuse you of creating these queues to bolster your revenues.
I was given unobtainable numbers to call by your staff, I was generally abused and in the end, after about eight hours, 15 calls and no progress I was handed over to your customer services department whose sole recommendation to me was to call again one of the numbers where your staff were particularly unhelpful.
On Thursday 9th October I received a telephone call from someone purporting to be from your company. They referred to my letter of 29th September and after a short introduction he told me that he would be sending me the Recovery CDs that I need. Well, why am I not surprised that almost two weeks later I have received absolutely nothing from you?
I am sitting here now looking at an expensive and utterly useless laptop computer. It will not work and you are not helping me in spite of your International Warranty. You are failing in your duty to help me.
Let me explain further: I told you in my letter of 29th September that the HP laptop is my business computer and that I need it in order to carry out my duties for my clients. Since your service is so bad, so slow; and because you seem to be working in complete contradiction of your code of business ethics of course, I have had to buy another laptop to keep my business working. You alone have caused me to have to spend almost £400 of my own money to bale out HP. Depending on your response to this letter, I am considering taking legal action to recover this expense from you.
I did remind you of your code of business ethics in my previous letter; and here are the pertinent elements of that code again:
- We are passionate about our customers
- We have ... respect for individuals
- We perform at a high level of achievement and contribution
- We act with speed and agility
Can you hold up your hand and claim that you have not broken all of these promises? In my experience you have smashed them all.
This is the third major problem I have had with this laptop and my experience of your customer services is that they are woeful. I really don’t know how many of your customers are suffering in the way that I have or who are prepared to be as direct as I am; but you get my award for the worst customer services organisation of 2008.
Yours sincerely
I told the Customer Services man on the phone today that the service they were offering was rubbish and since I was going on a lengthy business trip starting early on Thursday, I asked him if he could get the recovery CD to me tomorrow, Wednesday. His absolutely uninspiring response was that he would see what he could do.
DW
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