ZDNet and T&B readers rate their vendor's technical support service in our first Australian T&B Service & Support Awards. Who will come out ahead as Australia's most reliable?
What's your biggest concern when buying a PC? Is it getting the best price? The highest-performance specs? Recent independent surveys that we've conducted amongst Australian IT professionals indicates that what's at the top of the list is reliability: service and support. For that reason, one of the very first tasks we set ourselves for Technology & Business magazine was to research the state of service and support in Australia.
Methodology
To conduct our research, we put our questionnaire on the Web site between October 25 and November 28, 2001.
Over that period, we received 2661 responses from users who had bought a PC or notebook over the past 12 months. From these, we removed those that didn't provide proper contact details (quite a few respondents were loathe to leave personal information--no doubt thinking of privacy issues--but we felt this was important to prevent any "smear" campaigns that might conceivably be waged).
We also found a number of respondents that gave their opinions from points overseas (some people just love to fill out questionnaires!), and their replies were obviously removed. In the end, we were left with 1287 bona fide responses.
We offered no prizes or "chances to win" to those who answered our survey (as studies have shown, these offers can sometimes skew results) so we were very happy with the large voter turnout--a similar survey done in the US (with prizes) garnered 5000 responses.
Questions put to customers included "Which brand of PC (desktop or notebook) do you consider to be most dependable?" and "What brand did you buy?".
From there we went on to support issues, asking questions such as "How satisfied were you with the resolution of your problem by the manufacturer?", "How courteous/discourteous did you find the tech support personnel to be?", and "How knowledgeable did you find the tech support personnel to be?".
One of the biggest issues that comes up with service is phone support. So we evaluated local opinion by asking for respondents to tell us the average numbers of minutes they spent on hold waiting for help, the number of tech people that were required to help them solve their problem, and the average number of days required for a solution.
Another crucial part of after-service is Web support. And it's in this category that we got some very interesting replies. We asked users whether visiting the vendor's Web site enabled them to solve their problem. We also asked them to rate the ease of finding tech support guidelines.
To make sure that response rates were significant, we did not accept results from any category in which we did not receive at least 50 responses. Apple, for example, did very well on solving customers' problems, but because their response rate wasn't significant (fewer than 20), we did not include them in the Top Three.
Each of the 21 questions in the survey were weighted and totalled to come up with an overall winner.
For the individual categories, each manufacturer earns a grade from A through F based on responses to factors such as percentage of units needing repairs, satisfaction with reliability, and likelihood of buying again.
To get a more targeted view of the results, we also look at a subset of our responses, including only respondents in IT professional/managerial roles (620 responses). These results are noted when there was a noticeable difference in relation to the general response.
The January issue of ZDNet Australia's Technology & Business Magazine contains more information on the survey results. For subscription information, visit Technology & Business.
Dell's service is not always as good as your recent Service & Support Award suggests. My now aging Dell notebook has had the same video card/screen fault repaired ten times (yes, 10, I have all of the paperwork!) since purchased new in 1998. As I write, the video card/screen has failed for the eleventh time and I am back on the Dell service treadmill!
Dell's initially good service has faded to atrocious with long repair delays and poor communication. In Dell's defence the notebook was repaired each time under warranty (as it should be) but that does not allow for the time cost to me for not being able to use the Notebook upon which I depend. With the exorbitant transport costs from regional Queensland and parts and labour I would have thought it cheaper just to replace the unit with one that works - apparently not.
It now appears I have to fight Dell to have the unit fixed properly or replaced - and fight I will. The Dell technician now claims the unit has been fixed, insinuating the problem is my fault - a bizarre claim when it is clearly a design or manufacturing fault. I note that my workplace has another Dell notebook with a very similar video problem.
With the greatest respect to those who voted for Dell I must sadly disagree. Despite the notebook being very good between repair dates, I can never again recommend Dell. On a positive note, the Unisys (Brisbane) technicians that contract Dell repairs have been excellent. Buyer beware!