HP Technical Support getting worse

[Shutterbug2006]

I had the occasion to call HP Technical Support on Wednesday last week. The computer I use to print from had crashed and burned, so I had to reload the drivers on another machine.

When I got the HP Z3100ps GP 44", it came with an Eye 1 monitor profiler, but the serial number on the disc envelope didn't work.

When I went through this exercise a year and a half ago, it took several hours on hold and talking to various HP techs, before I was given a new serial number that worked. They had made a mistake in production and a ton of these units were distributed with defective installation serial numbers for the Eye 1.

I had finally got fixed up with it, and neglected to write the new serial number on the disc package. I guess I wrote it down on a piece of paper, intending on writing it on the disc package - but by then, I was so frustrated I was just happy to get on with printing.

When I called HP on Wednesday, I was shuffled to a second support technician, and sat on hold for nearly two hours.

I couldn't remain on hold anymore, my cordless phone was starting to die. So I grabbed a second cordless phone and dialed the folks that made the Eye 1, Xrite.

The time for that phone call was all of three minutes, and I got my serial number and was on my way.

HP sucks, every time I have ever called their support line, I have either been shuffled around or put on hold, and I don't know who to blame.

It's just a good thing it was a 1-800 number.

[EricWHiss]

I recently spent a couple hours on the phone with HP - not on hold but bouncing back and forth between different staff all equally uninformed and unhelpful.  I like the quality of the prints I get from their printer but not happy with their support.  Why not train a few people on each product so they can do more than tell you to turn it off and back on and see if its working?

On their website they proudly announce something about the best customer service - LOL

[Thomas Krüger]

So the HP APS software works also with a plain Eye 1 using the HP software key...

[Deepsouth]

Your experience is getting to be typical. Many manufacturers are letting "community" resources do their customer support (e.g. forums like this one). The mfrs used to host forums until people posted nasty things about their products, then the company hosted forums pretty much went bye-bye. The truth is that many consumer electronics companies, excluding the very top end, do their beta testing on the public. In a sense, this is necessary since time to market is getting shorter and shorter. Look at the digicam market, Canon vs. Nikon vs. Sony vs. Panasonic. The turnover in models is incredible as they compete. The consumer can win if the competition drives better products, but that is not always the case as consumers are often mis-educated in the process. I'm an audiophile and the situation in that world is unbelievably bad and the consumer is losing ground.

A suggestion: Call your regional HP sales office, lie if you have to get past the receptionist, and get the sales team to identify who the point of contact for supporting _your_product is. I learned that with Canon, I have to ID who supports my product, or I end in the general que of calls on hold till doomsday.

If this doesn't work, find a commercial outfit that uses the same series of printer you do, buddy up to them, and find out who they call. They may have a service contract but at least they can ID who the support people really are. I had to do this with an older product and it worked like a charm, until the product was no longer supported, and I had to start all over again.

[deanwork]

For an "in warranty" customer, I think the HP phone support is abysmal. Recently when they had the bad media circulating, I had to be the one educate them about it, over and over before they would believe me. They only reason I was able to do that was by printing our threads from this forum and sending them and emailing them to a lot of people in the corporation. A month later they sent me 4 rolls for the 3 I had wasted money on. If that had been Epson it would have taken a week at most.

The issue of replacing the "tan" rollers required opening another whole job with them even though I had asked for them twice. I just don't have time for this. I have to try to make money, sometime.  They wouldn't admit that the tan rollers even existed, after all this time,  until I sent them the jpegs of them (again from this site) with their serial numbers.  Eventually you run out of time and patience, but I'll get back to it someday.

Personally I like the guy who comes out here to do the work, he tries hard,  but he seems just as baffled by the maze of corporate buck passing as anyone. I found a really good HP guy in San Diego that looks into media. But only because of someone on this forum who has similar issues knew of him was I able to give my guy here his name and get some action.

For my little problem of the bad 44"  Pro Satin media rolls, that they eventually replaced, I talked to 3 or 4 phone people, who may to this day still not know what my problem was. I had to replace three print heads, order overnight shipments in the middle of a job three or four times, and waste countless amounts of ink, to get back to the answer that I already knew, that there were bad batches of Pro Satin circulating for 2 years.

I'm not saying that Hp is alone in bad corporate phone support, I've certainly heard nightmarish stories about Canon printer support, and if you are out of warranty on an Epson look out,  and I do really like the Z - but man, I do believe that when companies get this big and offer thousands and thousands of products like this it becomes very, very, complex to get a simple solution solved. Maybe that is just the world we live in now. I hope not.

John