Hello
Hello there,
I used to work for Esplex in the call center in a senior position. Somewhere between a "drone" (as someone put it) and management. I've read these comments on here for a long time now with great interest and had to reply and perhaps give another perspective on some of the issues raised.
This post forms my personal opinion entirely.
I will warn you now, this is very wordy but some people may find it interesting.
Firstly, I have to state that I enjoyed working at Esplex. It was very challenging at times but also very rewarding. It must be said that the vast majority of people working at Esplex are hard-working, good people and I count some of them as my good friends.
Therefore, I would say that the people on this forum who has criticised the people working at Esplex haven't worked in a customer-facing role before and therefore do not understand the challenges of working with members of the public. That makes their opinion flawed. If these people cannot realise that their opinion is flawed, then they are being unreasonable (or stupid) and that means the issues they are reporting with Esplex have probably been created by their unreasonable attitudes.
Next, let me talk about Esplex as a company. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Acer Inc. This information you can find out from the website, but what it won't tell you is how Esplex actually fits into the Acer picture. At first my comments may seem pointless but please bear with me.
Esplex is split roughly into 4 bits - the Call Centre, the Repair Centre, 'Logistics' and the other admin-y type bits that every company has (HR / Finanace / etc).
The Call Centre takes calls from members of the public and deal with those call. Basically, there are 2 types of call - people reporting a fault or people chasing up faults.
Fault reporting is handeled by the technical support team who have at least basic IT knowledge (don't get me wrong, some people there are VERY IT literate). People chasing up faults are first dealt with by the Customer Services team. This is a team of people who (and I'm sure they will agree with me on this one) not IT Experts by any means. Sure, they can use computers and work with them every day but that doesn't make them experts.
When things go wrong with repairs, or when customers make complaints (and some customers complain about really silly things, trust me on that) it is dealt with by the Escalations team. This is a team mixed of people with a lot of experience dealing with customers and a couple of Techies who look at emerging issues, etc.
So, the lifetime of a call raised by a customer (the call centre being the first point of contact) should go something like this:
Report Fault to Technical Call Centre Agent
Call CityLink and get machine picked up / onsite (whatever warranty they have)
Chase Up repair with Customer Services
If required, complain to Escalations, etc.
Having worked in the call centre for a long time before I left, I can tell you a few things about it.
1) A lot of customers are a law unto themselves and seek to push themselves as far as they can without letting the natural call-lifetime model explained above go through. These people are selfish, arrogant people who beleive that they are more important than anyone else. Let me tell you, Esplex HAVE to treat every case as being of equal importance - it isn't our place (nor is it usually possible) to determine which person is of a higher importance than the other one. Of course, there are some cases that are clearly higher priority (for example, where someone has had the same fault a few times) and these are dealt with by the systems put in place within the call-lifetime model.
2) It is often extremely difficult for the Tech team to determine exactly what is wrong. Bear in mind, they are on the end of the phone a long way away and cannot see the unit. With computing sometimes faults are detected not by what a unit does, but by HOW it throws the fault, WHEN it throws the fault and what other things it does or doesn't do. This cannot be ascertained over the phone. Also bear in mind that many people who do purchase computing equipment are not technical and so cannot explain to the Tech what is going on. All of these factors mean that often the machine is coming in for repair with no real idea of whats up with it - THROUGH NO FAULT OF THE CALL CENTRE AGENT OR THE CUSTOMER. It is the very nature of troubleshooting on the telephone.
3) The systems that are used are being updated all the time, but it is still very hard to find out all the information that people request. It may seem like a cop-out to say "i can't tell you when you are getting the machine back" but it happens to be the truth. Esplex and Acer are very much aware that this needs to be vastly improved, but sadly magic wands which can be waved to put this change into place do not exist and we must indeed rely on the boring and time consuming practice of employing very expensive developers to go through the fun problem - feasability - analysis - design - implementation - test cycle. This takes time. Beleive me when I say, the system we had when I left is better than the system we had when I joined to an order of magnitude. This of course causes problems for the staff and thus to the customer because the customer expects (quite reasonably) to have answers to such questions as "when will I have my machine back" instantly. The problems come when customers get angry at not being able to get such answers instantly. This is the fault of the customer because the problem with the systems Esplex uses HAS been identified and IS being fixed but again, there is no magic wand to fix it instantly.
4) Customers are often very unreasonable. I'm sorry to say this, but there have been rather a lot of demands I have had on the phone that it wasn't possible to meet. Demands like "I want that laptop back in my hands by the end of the day". Sadly time travel hasn't been invented so the customer had to make do with 9am the next day.
5) The big one - CUSTOMERS DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEIR RIGHTS ARE. This effects Esplex in a couple of ways. Firstly, we have to deal with all the ignorant people who don't actually know what their rights are and are sometimes branded as "liars" as a result. Secondly, it wastes a lot of time because sadly we can't advise customers what their rights actually are. (We do that, we have given legal advice. We get caught doing that without legal training and accreditation and the advice is slightly wrong, we get our backsides sued. Therefore, not happening).
I will give you a nice hint about what I'm talking about here, but before you proceed bear in mind I'm not legally trained and therefore I urge you not to take what I'm saying as being correct, nor as being advice, just as a statement of my understanding of the law. If you want to find out what the law is, see a solicitor, the CAB or someone else qualified to advise you on this.
I am talking about the sales of goods act. Its quite simple really, the idea is that anything you buy from a shop should be fit for the purpose it was sold for. So, you go buy a washing machine, you take it home, you plug it in, it blows up. It wasn't fit for washing clothes, so the shop that sold you it legally has to replace/refund.
Now, a common misconception that customers always have is that its an Acer laptop therefore it is up to Acer to replace/refund it. This is not the case for one reason. Acer didn't sell it to you.
The next common misconception is that if a unit is in for repair for more than X days or Y weeks, then Esplex/Acer is obliged to replace. Again, this is not the case. Trading standard have NO set time frames. They use terms such as "in a reasonable length of time" but reasonable is not defined.
Customers expect "reasonable" to be defined by what THEY consider reasonable. But trading standards don't. "Reasonable" is defined on balance between what is reasonable for the customer and what is reasonable for the company. For example, if a unit was in for repair and the part was in stock and yet the unit sat there for a month, that would be very hard to justify as reasonable. Yet, if it was simply not possible to have the required part for 2 months or so, I suspect (depending on other circumstances of course) that trading standards would accept that as being reasonable.
These two issues I have talked through probably take up a very big (>50) percentage of the calls / letters into the call centre. If people knew their rights and if people understood what these rights actually meant, then guess what? Calls would take less time to get through, staff would be free to work on any underlying issues (such as systems! yay!) and staff would be less stressed. (I bet some people at this stage are thinking "i don't care if the staff are stressed, thats what they are paid for". These people are selfish morons. If you or your loved one was constantly stressed at work for reasons outside of their control you would care. So think before you comment.)
My last note on the call centre, you have to bear in mind that Acer/Esplex is a commercial venture and exists to make money. You may not like that, you may not care about that when you are waiting on a laptop being repaired but this is the cornerstone of a capitalist civilisation.
In a non-profit making company it would be wonderful to throw all the resources required into departments that need them. The call centre being a case in point. When I was there, we often didn't have enough of everything we needed (like staff / demo machines / etc).
But as I said, Acer/Esplex IS a profit-making venture. The Call Centre and Repair Centre is a major part of the business, but will always make a loss from what it brings in by its very nature. If you put yourself in the shoes of a boss of a business where one of your departments makes a loss and can NEVER make a profit, do you throw wodges of money into it or do you run it on a shoestring?
Again, people will be saying "I don't care about that" but these people too are selfish morons. If every company threw money away then every company would fold - no one would have jobs which paid money with which to buy laptops and computers in the first place. And civilisation would collapse as money became worthless and we all become unemployed, living on potatos in cardboard boxes under bridges. I don't want that.
Next we move onto the repair centre. I haven't worked there, although I worked closely with some people from the repair centre and became good friends with some of them.
The number of machines coming in vs the number of engineers working on machines is of a ratio of about possibly 30:1. We are talking 600 units in a day compared to 20 engineers. That sounds a lot, but each day Acer probably sells tens of thousands of units, so that really is a very small percentage.
If it takes an hour to repair a machine (very rough averages here), with 20 engineers then each day generates rougly 4 days of work for the entire repair centre. Therefore what is the answer? More efficient repairs, which means faster repairs, which means more mistakes make. The engineers are only human after all. Which leads to repeat complaints which leads to more work for the repair centre and the call centre. The engineers still work hard every day doing their best despite all the difficulties they have with parts etc (see comments on logistics later).
So whats the answer? Throw more money are the repair centre? See my comment about money and the call centre for why that won't happen.
So what IS the answer? If you can answer that, then you are a management genius and earn more money in a year than I will see in a lifetime, so good for you.
Lastly we have the Logistics part of Esplex. Logistics deals with getting parts in and sending parts out where they are needed. Something probably no one realises is that Esplex holds and manages parts for ALL ACER REPAIR CENTRES IN EUROPE, THE MIDDLE EAST and AFRICA. Not just the site in Plymouth.
Imagine that. The sheer volume of parts in and parts out makes it a logistical nightmare. I cannot recall exact figures but when I was working there it was around a MILLION parts moved around A WEEK. These parts require warehouse space, which requires packers, pickers, shippers, etc etc etc.
Demand for these parts is ESTIMATED on sets of statistics, etc.
The parts are usually not manufactured directly by Acer. It is a common misconception that Acer manufactures all of the parts in the unit. Acer manufactures the COMPUTER/LAPTOP/TV/WHATEVER from parts sourced from other companies. Therefore, another job role of logistics is to purchase the parts required from around the world (bearing in mind numbers are estimated) which are then shipped to Plymouth and distributed from there.
The poster who sent part supply problems are due to Esplex not paying bills is total nonsense and betrays a lack of understanding as to how the business world works. Do businesses pay for goods and services up front? Erm, no. Part supply problems are usually due to the nature of buying from around the world and delays that happen in import/export, stock levels etc.
Anyway, you have all this going on with the logistics team along with them liaising with other repair companies who buy parts from Acer directly, etc.
I've never worked in logistics but from my understanding of it as outlined above it sounds pretty difficult to me. I don't envy them.
How to resolve these problems, especially parts supply? Get more suppliers to send more parts! But how to do this without throwing money away, resulting in the scenario with cardboard boxes under bridges as specified earlier? Answers on a post-card please.
All in all, the logistics department is a fine balancing act and 99% of the time they get it right. The 1% that something bad happens can usually be traced to things outside of Esplex's direct control, but it is always down to 1 person somewhere. Guess what! They are human too!
So, after all that, to sum up, here is what I would like you to take away from my uber post:
1) Many problems are caused by unreasonable people. People become unreasonable either by a lack of knowledge or a lack of intelligence. This cannot (nor should it) be changed by Acer/Esplex.
2) Many problems are caused by the nature of the technical diagnosis being performed over the phone. This cannot be changed by Esplex without extreme financial loss by Acer/Esplex.
3) Many problems are caused by lack of information. This IS being resolved but will take time, therefore people getting frustrated by this fall into point 1.
4) Many problems are caused by part supply issues. This it outside of Acer/Esplex's control, therefore people getting frustrated by this fall into point 1.
5) Many problems COULD be solved by throwing money at it, but as said before if companies did that they would fold, making people lose jobs. If every company did that people wouldn't have jobs in the first place and our capitalist society would cease to exist.
6) People who have problems complain. People who don't have problems don't say anything. I'm sure if you had a truly representative poll on who has had problems and who hasn't the percentage of those who have is tiny, maybe 1% or 2%. Of course Acer/Esplex would love to see that number fall, but see point 5.
7) EVERY SINGLE COMPANY - EVERY SINGLE ONE - NOT JUST IT COMPANIES - will have faulty units and indeed the percentage across all the companies is pretty standard. This support board and the websites you get if you search for "Esplex Sucks" or whatever have been started by people who happened to buy Acer and had bad luck. Guess what? If they had purchased an HP or whatever their website would now be decrying them instead of Acer... The internet is a safe forum for complaining waaay out of proportion about something due to its safe, cosy, away from real life and has-no-accountability nature. Ever seen Acer on watchdog? Me neither.
And that, is that. If you've read the whole thing, well done. If you still work at Esplex/Acer and are reading this, I hope you will agree that what I have said is fair.
Cheers
FaithDefender
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