A few days back, I had the good fortune of interacting with the Acer’s repair center in Bangalore. Here is how a part of the telephonic conversation went:
Me: I need to know where the customer service center is located. Can you please give me the address along with a landmark?
Them: Sir it’s in front of St. Joseph’s Arts and Science College. It’s near Richmond circle.
Me: I don’t know where St Josephs’s Arts and Science College is. So can you please tell me as to how can I get there from the Richmond circle?
Them: Sir it’s right in front of St Joseph’s Arts and Science College.
Me: I really don’t know where this college is.
Them: Sir it’s in Shanthinagar. (Giving me a whole freaking Lok Sabha constituency as a landmark was very helpful on their part.)
This conversation ensured that I had a very high opinion of them, even before I had the privilege of meeting them. It’s kind of superfluous to state that I wasn’t in the least disappointed after visiting this repair shop. To provide a bit of background information, I had a HP laptop that I used for 2.5 years and this HP laptop had caused me less problems than an Acer Aspire 3680 has caused me in 6 months.
My Experience at the repair shop:
The visit to this repair shop was very enlightening to say the least. Some of the pearls of wisdom that were very graciously shared by the service center folks are as follows:
1) Please don’t update your windows OS regularly. This is the reason your OS has crashed. (No comments)
2) Opening the laptop and cleaning it would help the power button in functioning normally (WTF). Although to be fair, he said that it is only a temporary solution (WTF again).
3) Changing a small ring-shaped part will cost 15K at 11 AM in the morning and 5K at 12:15 (Didn’t know that the price of electronic items fall that fast) in the afternoon. God knows why something that trivial requires a chipset level change which in turn would lead to a change in the motherboard (I would have laughed aloud, if the joke wasn’t on me).
4) Two people in front of me were asked to go for an Annual Maintenance Contract worth Rs 6016 (or something like that). Unless they expect us to use sledgehammers on our laptop, I don’t see the point of this contract (That would be true for other manufacturers. For these “Touch me not” series of laptops, it is quite a fair deal. Hell, I got a total estimate of 22k for a laptop costing in the region 35k :D ).
To top it all, each time a problem was narrated to the contact person; he closed his eyes (not unlike the manner in which Hiro Nakamura does while freezing time. He probably did that to figure out the maximum amount that one would be willing to pay for the given service) and came up with estimates such as 2k, 5k, 15K.
Last few words on this
1) Don’t know why people refer to Wall Street Bankers as “Thugs” when the masters of the art reside in India.
2) Acer - Buy at your own peril
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"Please don’t update your windows OS regularly. This is the reason your OS has crashed." ... Thats a very sane piece of advice, especially if you are still stuck with Vista.
ReplyDeleteFor HP I would add -- Go for an extended warranty service at your own peril. I extended my warranty for 2 years (because you can't extend your warranty for just 1 year) 1 day before my factory warranty was about to expire. Once I paid them I came to know that the start date of my warranty was marked as 1 year before the day when I bought the warranty ie. the day that I had actually bought the laptop.
We had to turn on that auto-update feature at onmobile, my os never crashed due to that.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I had xp in my system.
I never dealt directly with these HP folks, but from your experience I can see that they would be as painful to deal with as these Acer guys.