PC Reliability & Service: No Safety Net

Cutting the Cord

PC makers have a huge incentive to send you online for support: The arrangement saves them money. When you factor in staffing and other overhead, phone support costs system makers roughly $15 to $22 per call, according to Service Strategies, a consulting firm in San Diego. Those expenses can quickly swallow up the narrow profit margin on a sub-$1000 machine.

"You can't afford to give unlimited, 2-hours-on-the-phone, toll-free support forever, especially to somebody who paid $499 for a system," says Michael Griffin, Acer's vice president of customer satisfaction and technical support. By sending users to the Web, PC makers can cut support costs in half, says John Hamilton, president of Service Strategies.

But vendors also say they can provide a better service experience online. "Nobody wants to wait on hold for a technician," explains Don Neske, special projects marketing manager at Quantex. "We want to lower our hold time, and we think we can do that by conditioning our customer to think Web first. Then we want to deliver in-depth information that makes it a viable alternative to phoning in."

Other manufacturers insist that consumers are driving the move toward Web-based support, attracted by the ability to choose when and for how long they search for solutions or fine-tune their machines. "Why not give you the keys to the car and allow you to self-select what you want to be informed about?" says Dell's director for online support, Manish Mehta.

So far, however, PC World readers have been slow to cut the telephone umbilical cord to their PC vendor's support desk. In our survey, respondents said they had attempted to solve their most recent hardware problem online less than 20 percent of the time. Roughly 10 percent of those who sent e-mail to their PC vendor's support department or posted a question on the manufacturer's Web site never received a response. Of those who got an answer to their online questions, nearly three-quarters of the respondents said the information didn't solve their problem.

Retired Air Force Colonel Carl Abrams of Washington, D.C., easily solved a serious problem with his Compaq desktop PC by going to Compaq's online FAQ page. But the solution to a problem with his two-year old Dell notebook proved to be somewhat more elusive.

"I downloaded a new video driver from the Dell Web site," he says. "As soon as I did that, the computer would only open in safe mode, and it wouldn't print. So I e-mailed Dell, and they very nicely sent a long e-mail with seven different ways to cure the problem. But none of them worked." Eventually, Abrams got the correct answer offline from his software developer son--who got his answer from software giant Microsoft.