after sales service should not be an after thought

So, wife number one and myself finally took the plunge and went to purchase a laptop.

Between two different college courses, two different work venues, and a Wifi connection at home not doing much, we figured we’d get enough usage to warrant the cost.

We chose a HP Pavilion TX2550ea – mainly because of the tablet abilities.

And we chose to purchase the tx2550 from CCL Online. CCL online have been rated best online retailer by PC Pro magazine for the last three years running and you can pay extra for a ‘laptop checking service’ – someone switches on the computer and checks it works before they send it out and if it doesn’t work in the first seven days, you’ll get the extra money back, they’ll pick up the laptop and replace it like for like.

Nice.

I bought from their website on the 26th September (and the money went on my credit card); the order was processed on the 30th September and it arrived about 4.30pm on the 1st.

Then it started going downhill.

Wife number one begins to watch a recorded episode of CSI:Miami while I go Garfield on the box. (see this post)

The documentation that comes with it says that setting it up for the first time can take ten minutes or more (the documentation online says it can take over an hour!) but I plug in the battery, start charging it up and switch it on as per the quick start guide.

Vista starts to do it’s thing and I set up my account with password and it starts to Prepare My Desktop!

Then I get the MSOE.dll missing error from Winmail and the screen goes to a lovely shade of blue.

Not the BSOD blue but a nice pastel hue. Wife number one finishes watching the second half of CSI: Miami and I’m still looking at the same blue pastel hued screen. I have control of the cursor, Task Manager works but there’s no proper desktop and the Start menu is AWOL.

By now it’s gone 5.30 and CCL’s telephone support have finished for the day.

So I spend several hours logging into Safe mode on the laptop, trying to fix Winmail or creating accounts in the hope that a different account will be able to load properly.

Fail.

So around 11pm that night, I use their online enquiry form to inform them of the problem.

At about 3pm the next day, having not heard from them, I call them up, knowing I need a returns number and thinking it doesn’t leave much time for a guy to come pick it up (that next day swop out as part of the laptop checking service). After being trapped in a queue for 20 mins I finally get through and arrange after several minutes to have a pickup with a 2 hour slot the following day.

Okay.

The pickup slot comes and goes and an hour after the pickup was due, I call CCL Online again to try to find out where the pickup driver is.

After 15 minutes in the phone queue, I elect to leave a message, including my sales order number and ask them to call me back.

Nothing.

Then, of course, it’s the weekend and they aren’t open at the weekend.

I leave another message via their website giving them a new slot to pickup from on the Tuesday (as we weren’t around on the Monday) and ask them to call me on the Monday to confirm the time.

At 5.25pm on the Monday, I still haven’t heard from them and duly get trapped in the queue system again. No answer.

Currently, we are waiting to see if the pickup does happen on the Tuesday – 6 days after the delivery and 4 days after the first requested pickup.

If this is PC Pro’s idea of good customer service …

I was expecting to have to spend some time on the laptop – but I was expecting to have to remove all the bloatware. I wasn’t expecting to have to chase the company down because it didn’t work, particularly having paid extra for a service that is meant to check that it does work.

Checking around the tubes, I see that people either really love them or really hate them

… guess which way I’m leaning right now …

I’ll keep you all informed as to the progress.