yeah i understand
well the orders are in we're back at hq and it's time for us to review the most
challenging portion of fifteen hundred dollar sipc secret
shopper project secret agent magnum
ti thank you forgot your name again
this is how all of our competitors responded
to a fairly rudimentary technical
support request hi there um i just was setting up the
computer i bought for my brother and i noticed that in the system it says
there's only eight gigabytes of memory but in the order it's supposed to be 16.
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so
so first it's our favorite alienware
thank you for calling alienware the quickest way to get you to the right
support agent is to get your products express service code this is different
from your service tag or asset id
i don't know what my service card would be system is listed under premium support
warranty this is easy basically so i'm gonna need
to transfer you to bring your support is this five
minutes already of just pier about
are we just sitting here in silence again
hello hello is it me you're looking forward no you
know you're not doing on hold right when you have to come back and say hello
thank you very much for waiting are we 15 minutes into this call and they
haven't even gotten as far as who are you
and what do you have are we being asked for the order number
again okay ma'am just stay connected i'll transfer your call to the technical
department we're not at the technical department
yet
thank you for calling dell basic hardware warranty support where you have
your system service tag or the expert service code do you just ask for all our
information again oh my god we're explaining the problem again
oh i'm extremely sorry to hear that
man this should have not happened well you should not have happened yes okay
thank you astounding observation skills
i can just go ahead and connect your calls
with the union weight apartment okay now are we getting transferred again
we have had nearly half a dozen people that we've talked to at alienware in
pre-sales and after sales support
just put us on hold for a minute at a time
why what we need to do is open a computer and just double check
that you have two because it could be that one rom is not uh
connect it's not um like it needs to be
like reset or reconnected can you open
uh this uh the aurora hard drive to check if you have the tuba
um i could are you able to guide me through
it i don't actually know that much about computers
yes of course see she's a remote then and then she goes to youtube
and shows us the video about how to access the memory
okay all right well i'm okay with that on this video we'll teach you how to
replace your RAM modules on the aurora r5
nothing beats off peeling plastic covers off your new aurora again to alienware's
credit this system is pretty straightforward to get at sorry is this
the right video or are you looking for a different one yeah this is the right
video so it says r5 but uh basically
it's the same structure so basically you have to open
that panel do i need to unplug it first
no basically you don't need to uh okay so yeah you need to unplug the computer
and turn it off but
basically we're not gonna touch any
we're just gonna check if you have the true world when you turn it no it's
actually yeah
there you go janice's first first RAM swap everyone
ladies and gentlemen so in summary do i understand this
correctly it took just shy of a full hour
with five separate departmental transfers to
diagnose a RAM stick that came loose during shipping
hopefully the next one can do better here we go
all right origen show me your leadership now before i proceed i do
need to verify the information that i have on the account uh could you provide me with the address that we have on file
okay so it took four minutes to get to the point where we verified the order
and everything that's not terrible okay well yeah i definitely
definitely see that the invoice uh says two eight Gigabyte sticks of origin pc
ddr4 3000 megahertz RAM um
it's possible that maybe one of the sticks uh got loose during transit
possible uh given the vibrations that the machine undergoes during transit
uh you know very possible that one of the modules came
slightly loose enough uh you know to not be recognized
this would require you having to essentially open up your machine uh so
that you can double check on this um are you familiar with pc hardware to
any extent like uh would you be able to identify memory modules on a motherboard
um probably not would you be able to
help me out with that final problem absolutely you got the email with the
link to the to the dropbox video that's kind of weird why wouldn't they just host it on youtube
i gotta say alienware's production values were a little nicer that's
probably not the way that i would show most users how to do that ideally
putting using both your thumbs to put equal force on each end of the stick and
you'll feel a very noticeable click his video three out of ten his instructions
solid 9 out of 10. i gotta say janice for someone who
doesn't seem to have been doing this before you you you've done this a lot
faster than some of the most of the customers i i'm on the phone with so
smooth operator ah interesting so we've actually thrown
an extra curve ball at origin pc here plugging the HDMI connector into the
motherboard rather than our dedicated graphics card oh that big card it has a
ribbon cable that goes from the card itself to the motherboard
and um if that came blue slightly then you're probably not going to get a
picture okay this is a good explanation but he's got the wrong diagnosis let's
see how long it takes him and to clarify when you initially got picture um
do you know whether or not you were coming out of the graphics card or the
uh or the onboard video on the motherboard
he's done this before 19 minutes including a detailed
explanation and walk through of the pebcak with plugging the monitor
into the onboard i o versus the GPU directly
competence great job thank you for calling maingear
manufacturer of award-winning pcs and workstations now this is the real test
if they can manage to turn an order number into like
um that's not the order number i'm not sure what that is oh
really the order number would be
five or six digits and start with an eight or nine okay at least that's clear
instructions all right let me uh let me remotely connect to your pc and have a
look at a couple things all right pops up device manager i don't know what
he's expecting to find in device manager he's probably just kind of like oh i haven't done this in a little bit hold
on there it is slots used one of two yep
nope there's definitely only one stick in there that's crazy um okay let's make
sure that one stick didn't get loose immediately nails the diagnosis um if
you look inside your machine do you know where the RAM slots are
so 10 minutes to diagnosis you should see
a uh here let me go look through one as well so i can be more specific wow okay
nice there should be four or it could be four or eight but usually it's four
vertical slots oops it's two and it said that in task manager i guess they don't
sell a lot of low-end stuff i would usually assume a main gear system
probably has four or eight let's figure this out so if you could
just shut down the computer shut down the computer
i'm gonna have you open up the machine and we're gonna make sure those sticks
are in there properly does he mention to unplug it though okay so with the
computer shut down i want you to unplug all the connections from the back of it
all right rock on main gear guy looks like that's all it was just a loose uh
RAM stick but you're uh you're all set if you um run into any other issues feel
free to give me a call back sure thank you so much that's it
so excluding some six minutes random
nonsense with our monitor not properly waking from an HDMI signal etc
about 15 minutes
start to finish
dang one quarter of the time and so much less
frustration like it was just friendly the voice on the other end of the line
is crystal clear i mean you can't take that kind of thing for granted honestly like you could
understand the guy
for tech support straight to tech support like why
doesn't dell have that feature doesn't seem that complicated if you feel
comfortable looking inside of the pc remove the left side panel of the
computer pull out the sticks of RAM and simply re-seat them to see if in case
one of them is not treated properly got the diagnosis is that
uh where would i find that in the computer
on the motherboard excuse me did i even just hear you
correctly uh the motherboard if you don't know what a
RAM is i would advise you either seek
help from somebody a family member who perhaps has a little bit more experience
or have someone help you remove that stick around and receive them not
everybody has a family member that can help them that's why they bought a pre-built smart guy um okay
i don't really know who to ask so you you're not able to
like tell me what i'm looking for
i told you the sticks of RAM are on the rambar on the motherboard itself
so is it those two vertical
pieces on the upper right hand corner yes
so your troubleshooting stuff would be to pull them out and put them back in but again
be careful with that because if you don't know what you're doing and you break something you're going to avoid
all your warranty on the system
thanks buddy so i just should find someone else to
help me if you have a family member or a friend
who's tech diver yet
is i bypower employing her friend or family member
to provide their tech support
so he's just waiting for her to hang up like
hi yeah not not a problem to not be very helpful do anything
unreal in dell's defense they got the problem
solved an hour's investment in getting your new computer set up or whatever
is not the end of the world given you're gonna run it for eight or nine years
but to just treat the customer like an idiot
and outright refuse to help them okay uh
you're not able to help me through that not my ability to
mimic your ability to look inside a computer if you're not familiar with the
part it's going to be very difficult to do anything inside of the pc this
requires more technical skill it's not my ability it's your ability
completely unacceptable i'm ready it can't be worse than alienware
oh so they don't even have an easy way to get in touch with them i actually
don't even mind this form on one condition it gets best done
when someone picks up the phone
they have read and understood it hold on i'm
transferring you to someone who can help you now who do i have the pleasure of
speaking with today hi my name is janice
and the last name toll camp so he doesn't have the form
what is the purpose of the
holy form he's asking for her phone number
all right so what we're gonna do is we're gonna get a hold of the sales
department
why to get solutions for your hp product
please hang up and go to www.support.hp.com
where you can troubleshoot or get software and drivers when your phone
support that you can only call by finding the number by navigating the
website tells you to go to the website you done goofed
sorry i still didn't get that just tell me what kind of product you're calling
about desktop pc
okay we make many types of desktop pcs you might say something like pavilion
spectre presario omni touch smart or
envy go ahead and tell me what kind you have
omen have your product model and serial
number ready for your agent hold on i'm transferring you now
okay janice so yeah it looks like they did ship you out like the configuration
they ship you out does actually have just eight i don't see a showing 16 like
the one that you ordered we personally removed half the memory so
unfortunately uh while i do tech support i'm unable to
access like any of the sales software to look it up but i can't provide you the
number if you'd like
so here's the issue right now every company we talked to where the rep
had
an ounce of experience with pc hardware
immediately identified the problem i'm not imagining
that this is common okay um i know that
we're trying to get you over to like the canada sales department did they send
you back over to us yes
okay uh what did they end up saying um exactly uh well they did confirm that
like the order was for 16 gigabytes
um and then i got transferred a bunch of times and i ended up here somehow
interesting um let me
let me see here
you should have 16 gigabytes
right yeah that's what i thought as well
probably there's a um there's a setting that you need to
check or verify that ma'am if it's security i can connect you to our
technical support what setting makes RAM appear oh the shortcuts are downloading
my app is he actually going to start trying to troubleshoot for us now
is this is this the magic moment 20 minutes in or whatever let me put you on
a brief hold while i do a little bit more research here it shouldn't be any more than about
probably five to seven minutes or so i'll be right back with you okay janice
thank you for that
okay how long were we on hold 14 minutes
14 twice as long the amount of time we spent on
hold without nothing happening is the amount of time it took like main giant
origin to resolve the whole problem and the amount of time that dell spent
incomplete and utter silence
i don't know why they ended up actually transferring you back over to us that
should have been handled on their side of things in order to get that fixed because you just got the
computer it's well before the 30 day mark and
everything like that they should have been able to get that going to rectify
the issue for you you had mentioned like looking in the case and checking or like
seeing if i had the two sticks which i haven't done i don't know much about
computers so i didn't dare do that um
should i should i do that first again janice helping out tech support
here what can happen while computers are
being shipped and everything they do gets moved around and everything so it
could end up being that it just needs to be unplugged and plugged right back in
on both of them because we don't know which one could be unseated and then it
might actually fix your issue right there as being able to detect that it
has 16 gigabytes after that okay
he knows see here's my issue with this guy
because he has mostly come across as though he pretty much knows what he's
talking about the issue though is seems to be a policy
one if i had to guess within 30 days it's sales problem after 30 days tech
support's problem he just was trying really hard
not to have to do troubleshooting
instead opting to send free product or push us back to sales
like it's not like they weren't willing to solve the problem they just didn't
want to diagnose it isn't that weird
like eight gigs of RAM that's not insignificant that's like 80 bucks they
were just gonna send it hp managed to be
worse 72 minutes to get a stick of RAM unseated and
reseeded and hp had the advantage of janice already actually knowing how to
pull out and replace memory by this point are you ready to declare a tie
origin in main gear
with shockingly dell with that performance taking the bronze medal here
followed by hp who ultimately did at least solve the problem with i buy power
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