So you have had a think about the things you don’t like about buying things such as laptops. Now lets talk about the positive things. What have you seen that really impressed you? What made you thing “wow, that’s good service”. Again the scope is pretty open, talk about your shopping experience for any laptop purchase online or offline and any online purchase at all. What impresses you pre-sales, during the sales process, waiting for delivery, after-sales, the product, packaging, documentation etc. Talk about purchases from any vendor at all (you don’t have to name names, but you can if you like).
As promised in the posts under the previous section about bad vendors, here are a few comments about good vendors.
Good vendors eg Shure have an efficient, no-fuss after-sales service. (They make earphones for iPods.) Any problems are put right very quickly.
Elonex sent me a WristVault (memory stick) free of charge so I could rebuild my Webbook, and we can’t overlook Alan’s blog at the top of the list of helpful websites.
In short, good vendors care about their customers and try to help if there is a problem.
Scan Computers regularly win awards for their customer service. They sell PCs and PC components mainly.
I’ve used them on a few occasions and have had excellent service from them. Their website is easy to navigate; when you have a query, you can phone up and actually talk to a human who invariably helps.
The last order I placed with them, on a Wednesday afternoon, I was expecting to ship on Thursday so it would be here on Friday. I noticed by mid afternoon on the Thursday there had been no dispatch note. So I rang them to check. The “human” thanked me for calling, checked my order and basically said, they had had a problem picking one of the items but she wasn’t sure why. She then apologised for it not being shipped and put it on a ‘before midday Saturday’ delivery at their expense without me having to request it.
That’s the kind of thing I like. We all know problems occasionally happen. What counts is how swiftly they get rectified.
I will now add a comment to the ‘what sucks’ post too.
Al
Sterling Computers did it for me. I bought an X30 IBM Thinkpad from them at a great price, a refurb, but so far perfect in every way except one, a screw is missing from from the cover holding in the hard drive. When the hard drive came loose, causing the system to crash, they sent me a new one. When I finally figured out the problem was the missing screw, I was too embarrassed to ring them up and ask for a replacement for that! So well done for the service at Sterling, and extra marks for making available probably the most wonderful machines in the world, the Thinkpad series.