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Technical support?
Apr. 5th, 2001 01:32 pmAgainst my better judgment, I went ahead and invested in a new set of cartridges for my H-P DeskJet 660C. Wouldn't you know, the color cartridge is faulty. Instead of printing yellow, magenta, and cyan, it prints green, magenta, and cyan.
I went through all of the hoops suggested on the H-P web site (after navigating seemingly endless levels of pages), and even upgraded my driver to something published by H-P in 1998, but the colors remained bad. So, I called the company to get a replacement cartridge.
Getting the phone number is a trick. I tried the H-P web site again and found the number only by accident, I think. When I got to a point where it asked me to pose a question, I typed, "How do I return a cartridge for a refund?" and got nowhere in a Jeeves-like environment (heck, it may have been running a Jeeves engine, who knows?). Eventually, I stumble across the number, hidden among a bunch of other numbers, by clicking on every link on the site that claims to lead to "customer service."
I call the number and decide to sit tight and not press any buttons. Maybe they'll think I'm one of the vast minority of touch-tone-less folks out there, and connect me to a human right off the bat.
Nope, they think I'm one of the vast majority of people who would rather have root canal surgery than have to navigate tech support menus. It's press a button or hang up, please; you will listen to what we have to say.
So I press a button. Then another. there's a pause while a voice explains - in nauseating detail - a bunch of options I couldn't care less about. Press another button. Another pause while I listen to something that, timewise, weighs in like a State of the Union address. Another button gets pressed, and another. And another pause while the same voice explains all of the support options available to me, including the relation of several phone numbers to call in case I got this far in the process and suddenly decided I really don't belong in this phone queue, but the one for H-P calculators.
Who are they trying to kid? I'm now sticking like white on rice to my end of the phone. I will speak to someone after all of this electronic harassment, or I will know the reason why! I figure I've spent a pretty penny on long distance already. I have also been screaming my opinion of the voice mail system into the phone, in case the ringmasters of the H-P customer support circus actually do record - and listen to - incoming phone calls "to assure quality."
Aha! Finally! A human voice. I explain my problem. I tell them my printer's serial number. They take my name and address and say they're sending a replacement cartridge. Boom. It's over.
We could have done that without all the preliminaries, guys.
Cheers...
I went through all of the hoops suggested on the H-P web site (after navigating seemingly endless levels of pages), and even upgraded my driver to something published by H-P in 1998, but the colors remained bad. So, I called the company to get a replacement cartridge.
Getting the phone number is a trick. I tried the H-P web site again and found the number only by accident, I think. When I got to a point where it asked me to pose a question, I typed, "How do I return a cartridge for a refund?" and got nowhere in a Jeeves-like environment (heck, it may have been running a Jeeves engine, who knows?). Eventually, I stumble across the number, hidden among a bunch of other numbers, by clicking on every link on the site that claims to lead to "customer service."
I call the number and decide to sit tight and not press any buttons. Maybe they'll think I'm one of the vast minority of touch-tone-less folks out there, and connect me to a human right off the bat.
Nope, they think I'm one of the vast majority of people who would rather have root canal surgery than have to navigate tech support menus. It's press a button or hang up, please; you will listen to what we have to say.
So I press a button. Then another. there's a pause while a voice explains - in nauseating detail - a bunch of options I couldn't care less about. Press another button. Another pause while I listen to something that, timewise, weighs in like a State of the Union address. Another button gets pressed, and another. And another pause while the same voice explains all of the support options available to me, including the relation of several phone numbers to call in case I got this far in the process and suddenly decided I really don't belong in this phone queue, but the one for H-P calculators.
Who are they trying to kid? I'm now sticking like white on rice to my end of the phone. I will speak to someone after all of this electronic harassment, or I will know the reason why! I figure I've spent a pretty penny on long distance already. I have also been screaming my opinion of the voice mail system into the phone, in case the ringmasters of the H-P customer support circus actually do record - and listen to - incoming phone calls "to assure quality."
Aha! Finally! A human voice. I explain my problem. I tell them my printer's serial number. They take my name and address and say they're sending a replacement cartridge. Boom. It's over.
We could have done that without all the preliminaries, guys.
Cheers...
