my god!!!

i nearly bought an acer yesterday...but changed my mind at the last moment...i thank my lucky stars for stumbling on this forum..i never knew acer were absolutely crap...i just saved myself a lot of trouble..I'll now stick to my HP laptops from now on. Thanks ppl for your honest reviews!!!!!

I found this thread by Googling "Acer" an "frustrated" so I don't know how representative it is.
I managed to tread on my handheld Acer n30 in my sleep (and I made the mistake of telling this to the support staff). The support staff won't give me a quote for repairs. The gizmo set me back £130. Is it worth me trying to get them to fix it (and paying I don't know how much), or should I bin the thing and get something else?

Aramis - considering Acer ( or their agent Esplex) wanted to charge me £444 to replace a18 month old TFT panel that cost under £200 from other sources, I would bin you £130 Acer and buy another make. Don't throw good money after bad.

I bought an Acer Aspire from Comet yesterday and the CD drive doesnt open. Surely I should be able to take it back and just get a new one (cause of the short date) not have to send it for repair? What about consumer law for defected products?


Anyway, I strongly encourage anyone who has had problems with Acer support to fill out this form:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/watchdog/contact/computers.shtml

If enough people do it, Watchdog will investigate the support that Acer give and you might see them on BBC1 being given a hard time. Perhaps then they will buck up their ideas and sort out their support.

Please, if you have had a problem with repairs or service from Acer, fill out that form.

Friday 23 Sept 2005
I've been trying to get a LCD monitor repaired on warranty. After submitting a failure report via the website I got a ref No. excellent, I thought.

Monday 26 Sept 2005.
Morning - No word from Acer about returning the monitor. Gave Acer a call and followed the menu, and every time I selected 2 I'd get cut off.
Lunch Time - Tried the support line again and got an automated message " We are closed for lunch" ?????
(I must remember to ask the boss if we can do this at lunch time, If its good enough for a Euro support team its good enough for us)
Afternoon - I'm never less than 8 in the queue no matter how long I wait? I sent Acer my thoughts on the service they don't deliver via email, well I can't get them on the phone!

Thursday 29 Sept 2005
At last, Its only been a week and Acer have now sent me details on how "I" can arrange to have the monitor returned, shouldn't it be more like
Acer "hello We would like to arrange a time and date for our courier to pick up your faulty whatever"
Customer " Why thank you"

I Don't know if anyone from Acer ever reads this, They should have plenty of time over their lunch break.
I have now removed Acer from our vendors list, this is the 4th time we have had to have to contact Acer for a warranty repair and each time its taken at least a 5 days to get a reply and then it takes weeks to to repaired and returned. One laptop took 6 weeks waiting for spare parts.

I Don't know if anyone from Acer ever reads this, They should have plenty of time over their lunch break.

Oddly enough, some of us down at Esplex do have been reading this topic on our lunchbreaks and such.

Hi, I won't give you my name but allow me to at least do a partial introduction. I'm one of the technical agents down at Esplex in Plymouth who handles the calls which come into us from Acer customers. I haven't been with the company for a huge amount of time so I'm coming into it as something of a newbie with a fresh outlook on how things work within the department. Someone within the technical team actually pointed us onto a laughable site which some of you might be familiar with names the one linked below:

http://www.winpe.com/acer/


Now I've worked for various IT and retail companies over the years, usually within their customer services departments so I could say with confidence I've seen just about every type of customer and see the full range of what customer service in general can be. From the utterly diabolical to the above-and-beyond type of things many people rarely hear about. But when I saw this site I have to say it caught my interest that someone would have taken the time to attempt to discredit a single company so much. To be honest I actually find it rather chilidish to open a website to something so minor. But oh well. It brought me to these forums and this particular topic.

I'm here in an unofficial capacity. I want that to be absolutely clear. I'm not here at the knowledge or approval of Esplex or Acer nor do I intend to represent them. I just have the kind of attitude whereby I want to help people and maybe even rationalize with them to at least establish some kind of understanding between what the company rules are, what us as employees are required to do and the customers expectations from the company itself.

I wont make this an uber huge post because that boring so I'll cut it short there and move this post onto another one.

I'll address some issues directly with information that is basically given to the average agent. Usually we're told to just stick to the warrenty guidelines and only deviate with a supervisors permittion. However in my experiences Acer/Esplex like to stick very close to the warrenty limitations. I guess that makes sense as a company since as soon as you start breaking your own rules in the spirit of goodwill you find that word spreads and soon people are coming to expect it. Having worked under retail managers who buckle easily I can tell you that any consumer will try to justify their position by comparing it to someone they knew or heard about who was given special treatment as part of a goodwill gesture. But anyway...

I bought an Acer Aspire from Comet yesterday and the CD drive doesnt open. Surely I should be able to take it back and just get a new one (cause of the short date) not have to send it for repair? What about consumer law for defected products?

Ok. This is known as a DOA or Dead on Arrival. The warrenty states that in order for a machine to qualify as a DOA it needs to have the malfunction reported to us within 5 days of purchase, proof of purchase can be requested by the agent or company. Comet themselves have a very special deal going on with Acer. Rather than getting a discount for purchasing machines in bulk they actually get given a certain amount of machines for free. So it they buy 30'000 PCs from Acer they'll recieved another 10'000 for no charge for example. This is because Comet has the option to simply replace a faulty machine. Rather than claiming a creditnote from Acer for the faulty machine Acer simply keeps a tally of how many of that 10'000 machines have been used for a replacement. Naturally if Comet never replaces any machines the company has made 100% profit on 10'000 machines. So inherantly they'll try to avoid simply replacing a faulty machine with a new one.

How does this tie to the DOA policy?

Well. Any DOA is exchanged, no questions asked. This can be done by the retailer or Acer themselves. However in order to provide the replacement from Acer we need to have an engineer look at the machine and log a case for it in order to issue the replacement. The stores have to follow the same proceedure of course although they can inherantly do it faster. But they'd prefer not to since a replacement comes out of those free machines they were given.

As for consumer law. I dunno, we're not given the legal jargon but the Acer warrenties were indeed created by lawyers to begin with. So basically everything we need to know as agents is within those two pages. If you called through to me personally, I'd offer to book it in as a DOA (if it was within 5 days of purchase) which means you'd be without a machine for maybe around 5 working days before a replacement is issued. Not ideal but understandable when you consider what has to be done with it. Thankfully DOAs are handled as a 2-3 business day job. They arrived to us and they're one of the first packages to be off-loaded from the truck. They're then logged in and assigned to an engineer right away. This way the company works is why standard warrenty items don't get looked at for maybe around 2-3 days after they arrive. Preferancial treatment is nice, but it does mean others have to pay the price.

Morning - No word from Acer about returning the monitor. Gave Acer a call and followed the menu, and every time I selected 2 I'd get cut off.
Lunch Time - Tried the support line again and got an automated message " We are closed for lunch" ????? (I must remember to ask the boss if we can do this at lunch time, If its good enough for a Euro support team its good enough for us)
Afternoon - I'm never less than 8 in the queue no matter how long I wait? I sent Acer my thoughts on the service they don't deliver via email, well I can't get them on the phone!

First of all in reguards to sending emails to Acer, I have to say the system we have is wholely inadaquet to handle the workload. We use Lotusnotes connected to a central server and each morning an agent has to dump 20 emails into our folder for us to work through during the day. IF WE CAN. The customer services department is significantly smaller than the number of agents handling the phones. At least at explex it is. Theres around 6 people who are the CS team and maybe around 25-30 agents on the phones. I can tell you now, that the inbox currently has something in the region of around 300-400 emails sitting in there. Some of them dating back to the start of the month. Put simply, theres more coming in than we can deal with. As I said I was hired among with many others to imrpove the situation and more are on the way. But frankly with it getting towards the peak retail seasons I can see us not catching up with the amount of emails that come in even with new staff.

This is small comfort for everyone struggling to get through and who is being handed the "'due to the sudden increase in internet viruses/spyware" cover letter when they eventually get a reply. But I have actually seen meetings going on with the customer services staff and talk of them setting up a database for helpping to deal with the email side of things. Not sure what they have planned but its obvious they're aware of the issue.

Closed for lunch. Yeah. I have to say I was surprized when I went to work at Esplex that they break for lunch, I guess it makes more sense than having people going for lunches at different times since the absense of even one person causes the que itself to increase by around 3-4 people. Thus you can imagine that in order to fit in around 25 people to take their lunchs between 12pm and 5pm would require 5 people to be gone at once and suddenly the average que is increased by 15-20 people in a phone system only able to handle 50 in a que at a time at the maximum. Closing down for an hour actually works better than keeping the line open and sending folks on their lunches. So I hope that explains that to you.

On the phone side of things. The que times can vary from half an hour to 15 minutes. Not to shabby in my experience within retail where calling through to companies like HP and Packard Bell could take 20 minutes at the minimum. Dunno if they have improved these days or not. But since the new staff arrived the call times have been going down and there are still some more desks to fill yet. Thankfully the company is looking for a building within the region to open their out of warrenty advice line within. That will ease a significant amount of pressure on us down in Plymouth as I'd around 25% of the calls are for out of warrenty items. If you're expecting to call through to any kind of warrenty or national rate advise line and get a reply within 5-10 minutes you're expectations are too high to be honest. I've almost never encounters service that fast. Sure theres room for improvment within the department but its easily solved with more bodies. On average a single agent will deal with around 90 people a day, thats alot of customers with their issues being handled for a team our size and thats just the technical agents alone.

If you ever get cut off by the phones when calling in its only ever caused by 2 things. The first is that some telephone providers will automatically disconnect someone if there is no activity on the line for a certain length of time. You can contact your provider to have this feature disabled for your service if you find it happening alot. The other time this will happen is if you get to the front of the que but aren't dealt with by any agent. It'll then bump you to back of the que however if the que is more than 50 people long it'll disconnect you. Remember I said that the system can only handle a maximum of 50 in the que. Bear in mind that if this happens its because there was an agent available but they didn't pick up the phone when it was ringing. After 3 rings its passed to the next available line. Once its passed to all active lines but itsn't picked up you'll be dumped to the back of the que again. Not known this to happen much though to be honest.

Tal-N



I have read your article with great interest!

However there are a number of flaws in the law regarding the sale of new merchandise if and when these laws are rectified: and they will be, the consumer will then have the upper hand when dealing with the likes of I.e.: Comet/Curry’s Etc: so until the individual such as myself will not and does not purchase from such intimidating companies.

If a product were to be purchased from lets say Marks and Spencer’s =Woolworth’s and found to be DOA there is no haggling with that sort of company! You just return the goods and a refund and or exchange is dealt with on the spot! Try it! No quibble guarantee it’s called, apparently companies who do offer such a warranty and adhere to it have very little bad/poor publicity.

Therefore it is understandable as to why customers gripe about Acer/Comet Etc:

I wonder if one of the legal advisers to Acer Etc: had a problem with a purchase and received the same poor service as many others have on this forum! Would he/she then stand by the statement/warranty handed to the customer?

I would doubt that in all honesty.

Like you say you do an exchange and treat it as DOA well more people like you would do your employers proud.

Aramis - considering Acer ( or their agent Esplex) wanted to charge me £444 to replace a18 month old TFT panel that cost under £200 from other sources, I would bin you £130 Acer and buy another make. Don't throw good money after bad.

This actually happens alot. Only today I had someone who had smashed their screen and wanted an idea of what it would cost to repair it. Usually we aren't supposed to bother with details but frankly the call que was getting long and it would take longer to book the guy in than to give him an idea of what the part itself roughly costs. All agents have access to a parts guide which lists rough prices for spare parts, what I've seen makes perfect sense. An older part will actually cost far more than a new one because its not produced anymore and is now in demand. TFT moniter screens are actually more valuable induvidually than when they're part of a laptop for example. The fact you were quoted around £500 surprizes me since I've seen that is the low end of the spectrum. Many TFT screens themselves as spare parts cost upwards of £900 usually for ones that are from the past 2 years. Sometimes the much older ones will be cheaper but in that case they are the exception rather than the rule.

But what makes me laugh is how people say that Acer brand products are unreliable. Thats funny because Acer doesn't actually manufactuer a single thing. They have no factories of their own, they don't produce spart parts. What happens is they go to companies like HP and ask them to design what they want. Be it a moniter, a laptop, PC.. whatever. After being shown several prototypes the one the company wants is simply put into mass production at the same plants where many other name brands are made. Infact the places where the components are made for Dell machines is the same place where Acer desktop components are made. Same materials and everything. Infact in some cases its exactly the same components in a Dell machine as an Acer. I was shocked, I'd never heard of a company that actually uses third parties to produce their products. Kinda make sense since they use third parties for their customer services although Esplex is actually owned by Acer now, but at one point they weren't. I'd love to turn around to customers on the phone who claim Acer laptops suck and tell them that there is infact only around 3 factories in the world which produce laptop components and they are used by every major manufactuer including Acer. So how can one suck while another doesn't?