CopyDiva

Yesterday, my office suite mate, Dan accused me of listening to Muzak. Well, to be honest he was right, but it wasn’t something I was enjoying. You see, I was having a moment in time with the on-hold music of the customer service center for Toshiba, the maker of my laptop computer. Ok, a moment is really to short for what really went on — it was close to an hour. An hour to talk to someone about a erroneous charge to my credit card they made — an hour!

To be fair to Toshiba, their technical support group seems to really have their act together, and mostly when I speak to them, they don’t treat me like I am a computer idiot that barely knows how to turn on a computer. And, I can speak to a person within 5 minutes. The problem happens when I get transferred to customer service, where apparently no one works.

Yesterday’s call was at least the third call I have made regarding an outstanding issue with them. That issue: they sent me a faulty battery replacement. I requested a replacement for the replacement. They asked me to send the faulty battery back. I said sure, send me a return slip and I am happy to - what do I need with a faulty battery? So, do you think I ever got the return slip? Tried a few more times to get customer service to send me a return slip, complete with very long wait times to re-explain the entire issue to customer service whenever they did finally answer. The response was always “we’ll send it right out.” So of course, since I never sent the battery back, they charged me for it.

Allegedly, the issue is now resolved. I can toss the bad battery and they will credit my account. We’ll see. I remain less than confident in the whole process. I do know this: this problem has made it unlikely I will purchase another Toshiba laptop, even though this is my second one (though I was already leaning that way, because the current laptop is not nearly as good as my old one was). In a commodity market such as this, I would think good customer service and technical support could make the difference with customer loyalty.

The bottom line: When products are undifferentiated, what makes the difference is support, service and customer care.