Notebook Customer Support and User Satisfaction Survey Results

When you buy a laptop computer it's all to easy to get caught up in getting the best specs, latest features and best looking machine for the most reasonable price you can.  There's one thing people often forget when buying a notebook though.  Service and support are as important as specs and features, you're buying more than a product when you buy a laptop.  You're also buying into a company and trusting they'll provide you with a quality working product, and if not initially, they'll see to it that you are as soon as possible.  But not all companies are equal when it comes to service and support.  According to a recent survey by PCWorld EMachines, IBM and Apple brands are best with support, while Sony and HP sit in the cellar.

PCWorld teamed up with rating agencies Lynd Bacon & Associates and Research Results to collect its readers opinions between April and August of this year and gather feedback on products they had purchased.

Key Reasons for Satisfaction with service and support:

• Customers were able to communicate with a service representative that actually worked directly for the PC manufacturer rather than being a 3rd party outsourced employee that followed a script.
• Service representatives were able to make their own decisions on how to best help the customer.
• Service representatives were well informed about all of the companies products and knew them inside and out.
• Problems were resolved after the first call

Key Reasons for Disatisfaction with service and support:

• Major component malfunction such as graphics processor, CPU or motherboard that caused notebook to be inoperable upon arrival.
• Slight problem such as dead-pixels on LCD screen that were detected upon arrival of the notebook.
• Long hold times on the phone to tech support
• Hard to understand tech support while on the phone or support simply ran through a script and did not resolve the problem.
• Problem was not resolved after the several attempts at phone support, or even after shipping the product back.

According to survey results from PCWorld, 29% of Sony owners reported some type of hardware or software problems with notebooks they purchased.  Only 16% of Apple notebook buyers reported hardware or software problems.  Furthermore, 23% of Sony buyers who contacted tech-support to try and resolve their problem, indicated that their problem was just simply never solved.  The average for all company tech support simply not being able to resolve a problem is 14%, so Sony was quite a bit above that.

HP and Compaq also faired poorly being just slightly above Sony in their numbers. 

IBM was right behind EMachines at the top of customer satisfaction.  The interesting thing to observe with IBM going forward is if Lenovo (Chinese company), who recently bought out the IBM PC business unit, will be able to maintain the customer support levels.  If IBM support slips during the transition to Lenovo, it's sure to hurt their business.

Dell also faired well in the survey.  Consumers were generally fairly happy with Dell.  Dell also recently did well in a survey conducted by Technology Business Research (TBR).  TBR surveyed IT managers in large businesses.  The third-quarter result survey by TBR gave Dell the highest satisfaction rating among the world's top three PC manufacturers. HP scored 81.95 for the period, while IBM came in third with 81.66, so Dell was tops for business buyer satisfaction.

More: PCWorld Readers Survey of satisfaction with notebook purchase

More: Dell beats HP and IBM for customer support and satisfaction in large business