Reliability and Service: The Best Companies to Buy From

Self-Service

Certainly, vendors prefer that their customers use Web-based support because it's cheaper to operate. But as users' sophistication with the Internet grows, they're coming to accept online help. Over the past year, Sony's online chat feature has gone "from pilot to mainstream," says Sony VAIO customer service manager Stephen Nikel. The company's internal surveys show a positive bump in user reaction to online support, he adds. And HP reports a 65 percent increase in the use of chat over the past 12 months. Other vendors are moving more cautiously into chat. Dell started a pilot chat program a year ago and has been "giving it a bit more real estate" on its site lately, says Dell support chief Steve Young. Although he did not provide usage percentages, he says that the number of Dell customers who use online support is on a par with--if not greater than--the number calling up phone support.

Despite vendors' enthusiasm for chat, our survey respondents remain cool to it: Only 5 percent of readers said they used chat to contact a tech rep, up just 2 percent from last year. Why the resistance? Toshiba's internal customer surveys provide a strong clue. "With chat, one of the responses we'd get is, 'How do you expect me to use online chat if my computer is down?'" says Toshiba's David Norris.

"People want to talk to a person and tell them their problem. They want to get it fixed by a person who can cut to the chase," says Kay of phone lines' appeal.

E-mail is equally unpopular. As is the case with chat, nearly 7 percent of surveyed readers used this method to contact vendors. Companies aren't all that happy with e-mail queries either, since they can be difficult to answer. "It takes anywhere from four to five e-mails just to identify the customer's problem because of interpretation or description," Norris says. That makes people cranky. "They'll write an e-mail, get a question back, write another e-mail, and get another question back." It might take as many as eight messages before a company is able to provide an answer, he adds.

Then again, readers are more likely now to surf Web sites to find product information and drivers, according to our survey results. A hard-to-navigate site can irk people, of course. Ken Moorhouse, a maintenance man from Cammore, Alberta, Canada, couldn't get the TV tuner on his HP Media Center m480n desktop system to work. He went to HP's site to download an updated driver. "I couldn't find it anywhere," he says. He turned to online chat, though, and an HP rep guided him to the right driver and ultimately helped him resolve the problem.

What Customers Want

Overall, PC and peripherals users say they want tech reps who are native English speakers (preferably American English); better-trained reps who aren't merely reading from a script; shorter hold times for phone support; faster response to e-mail queries; and, finally, better-made products that don't require a tech support call in the first place.

The eternal moral for vendors: It pays to treat a customer right. Tech reps must be intelligent, polite, and--readers stress this most--easy to understand.