Acer - very poor support

[balladpunk]

research pays off

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!!!!!

 

[Aramis]

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?

 

[Gizzo]

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.

 

[kriz]

Contact Watchdog now

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.

 

[nibor1234]

Acer OUT TO LUNCH

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.

 

[Tal-N]

One face of the 'Enemy'

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.

 

[Tal-N]

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.

 

[Tal-N]

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.

 

[itsme]

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.

 

[Tal-N]

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?

 

[Tal-N]

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.

The thing is that comparing a retailer to a manufactuer is a common mistake. Sales of Goods acts and Trading standards don't apply to a company like Acer because the customer receives their product through a retailer, and the retailer got it from a distributor and the distributor got it from Acer. Obviously a retailer and manufactuer are at opposite ends of the spectrum so different rules apply. By law the manufactuer isn't obliged to provide a functioning product, only the retailer is. So the DOA policy itself is simply a gesture that Acer does. I've had people call the 5 day rule insulting because a retailer will exchange within 30 days sometimes. But all I do is explain to them this difference. They don't like it but they understand why it works like that and usually after much grumbling they'll calm down.

Would a legal advisor stand by the contract? Depends, people are difference so while some might be understanding because they did afterall create the warrenty guidelines others might be more hypocritical. In the end, the warrenty is there to make sure everyone is treated equally. Even if that is a pain in the ass when you're on the receiving end of a limitation of the warrenty itself.

I'm not special in how I deal with the customers. The DOA policy is well known and you could call up at anytime and find that its honored. The situation often is though that sometimes the customer wants their problem resolved yesturday not in 5 working days from when they call. Alot of some of these stories I see here appear to be missing critical details which explain why things happened a certain way. However I'm also certain that some of them are totally true and the bulk of these bad encounters look like administrative issues. Either the case was logged with a detail incorrect or something was messed up down in the engineer pits.

If someone has an active issue then post the serial number of the item and I'll have a look on the system and maybe give you a call or email to confirm that details are correct. Maybe I'll see that something was logged incorrectly and be able to fix it. No promises though, I'd be just doing it as a casual favour and as I said, I'm not doing this with Acer's consent so I need to keep any sneaking around in their database on the sly

 

[Tal-N]

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?

Well, lying to us on the phone actually works against you. Because if that PDA came in and an engineer saw the state of it they'd issue you with a bill for having it sent in and the time of the engineer spent away from other repairs to complete paperwork. Lying to customer support is a bad idea, because we are less forgiving should we find out you did it. Claiming that you received something in the box and it was broken when you opened it rarely works. I've never in over 5 years known an idem like a PC, PDA or laptop come out of the box and be broken from the start. It just doesn't happen unless the box itself is very very damaged.

As for estimates, we can't give them for two reasons. The first is that Acer as a company needs to make money, some of that comes from bills as a result of providing quotes. We're told not to give estimates for that reason mainly. But the second reason is that we honestly haven't got access to the figures for things like that. We could go ask a supervisor, but do you think they'll tell us? Don't bet on it, they didn't become supervisors by breaking the rules and guidelines agents are told to follow.

I'll tell you this though. It costs the company less to replace PDAs than to repair them. So what do you think they prefer to do? I didn't tell you that though. hehehe

 

[Tal-N]

The one annoyance I found with them though is their disclaimer saying they may wipe the hard drive, so to back everything up before it is sent off. Of course in my case I couldn't boot the computer up so couldn't back anything up! As a result they had to wipe my hard drive and reinstall windows, so I lost a years worth (about 15gb) of uni work, pictures, music etc. Luckily I had finished my dissertation a few weeks before, but it is still annoying.

Now I wanted to comment on this because I get at least a dozen calls a day like this. Now lets be totally and utterly fair here, looking at it from a logical point of view. Data that is important should be backed up, however how many people actually do that on a regular basis? I don't, sometimes I do. But the fact is that its our personal responsibility. Its annoying yes, but to ask an engineer who has no less than 4-6 laptops and maybe desktops sitting infront of them as they work on them to backup the data on those is unreasonable. Also it would further delay repairs. I remember one employer who I worked for used to do backups and because we took responsibility for the data we'd sometimes get complaints because some files were missed because the customer didn't make it clear what needed to be copied. Basically a company that decides to do the nice thing usually gets a bite in the ass from ignorant customers who don't take responsibility for their own actions. So as a rule, most companies don't do it. Just be glad we warn you it might be lost.

It was working the night before, but not the next day. However no lights came on, and pressing the 'power on' button did nothing. Quick call to Acer, again fast service and arranged collection. However it's out of warranty now, so it's going to cost me £35 just for them to look at it, then they'll quote me for the repair on top of that. I'm hoping it's not a hard drive problem because again I can't back anything up since I can't start the computer up! They've had it a couple of days and I haven't heard anything, so I hope it's not too expensive and it's done quickly (and that it's not a hard drive problem!)

Ok. Things that break out and are just out of warrenty are a sticky issue. According to the warrenty the company is not required to repair it. Not ideal, but frankly warrenties are bound to expire sometime or later. The exception to these rules are few and far between. Without seeing the case history it works like this. Any repairs which are done by engineers and required spare parts have their own warrenty. Basically the fitted part is not supposed to malfunction within 3 months from the date of it being fitted. If your laptop had had something like the mainboard replaced within the last 3 months and now its dead then even though your out of warrenty the repair wouldn't be chargable. Some agents aren't always aware of this clause and frankly it only takes a moment of lapse to forget so forgive some of us for being human. Sometimes it pays to call up twice to double check information, occasionally we're not all falling asleep at our desks in the morning. heheheh

Not heard for a couple of days? Thats normal. Chargable repairs sit at the bottom of the priority pile next to the basic warrenty repairs but behind DOAs and Acer Advantage extended warrenty repairs. Usually after it arrives to us the engineers won't look at it for around 2-3 days, a 5 working day turn around is actually quite realistic if the parts are readily available. But since the Esplex building hasn't got much of a warehouse we often need to source from further up the country, so add a minimum of 1-2 days for shipping if the part is actively in the warehouse and not on-site.

 

[Tal-N]

Dispelling some common myths I've heard

Acer/Esplex has no qualified technitians
While it might be nice for us in the callcenter to say that the engineers are actually trained chimps the truth is actually more scary. They're usually students! Arghhhh!! *Ahem* But yes, some have official qualifications some don't. The same goes for us Agents, some of us have IT qualifications and some of us don't. One guy in the agent pool actually didn't know anything about PCs when he joined and basically blagged his way through, but now hes got enough experience to be teaching IT to private students in his spare time. Myself? No official qualifications. But tons of actual practcail experience. Sometimes that gives me the edge over people who learnt from textbooks. But put simply, Esplex hires based on what someone actually knows, not based on the details of their CV. They're very careful to test us from what I can tell, they've had too many incidents will people claiming they can field strip a desktop in 2 minutes when infact the person can bearly operate a toaster. So now they're cautious.

Acer/Esplex filters their calls
Oddly enough our phones do show the number of the person who is calling or the details if they're using a boardband or ISDN line. However thats it. We get no automatic data from the phonecall so putting in 141 before you dial won't change anything. When I showed colleagues the conspiriocy theories about stuff like that we had a good laugh. It reminds me of something I learn way way back when I first started doin customer services... customers a re never wrong, but they can be very very mistaken.

Acer Sucks. Always
This boils down to common sense. If a company was totally horrible with their service they'd go broke. *cough*Tiny*cough*Time*cough* and thats a fact. I deal with at least 80 calls a day, in the course of a week I'll get maybe 5 or 6 people who are unhappy with the service. But usually I try to at least help them understand the situation and so far I've only ever had one 'screamer' in my time there.

 

[Tal-N]

Be back tomorrow, any questions for me?

Its the weekend tomorrow. (Hoorayy!!!) I'll be busy but I'll come on to check this topic. Feel free to give me direct questions in reguards to what you can do if you feel you've been hard done by. I'll try to see if I can find you some clause or loophole to use thats within the warrenty but bear in mind that this in unofficial advice and since I don't have access to case history it can make it hard to me to give you any good answers to your problems. Also feel free to ask any general questions about how Esplex operates or whatever, don't drag me into anything like Trading Stardards and stuff because I just don't know and most things like that don't apply anyway.

Have a good evening.

 

[Raje]

I'm right there with you.....

Wow... it was actually refreshing to read through all your stuff.... I too work in a call center.. and we are a third party entity for a VERY VERY popular Electronics store/InHome repair. Though I have to say I'm not inclined to openly disclose who I work for... I can tell you that I have posted a link.. and my company shows a funny movie that ends with " That will be $100.00 ma'am"

Some things are true and some false.. I myself have no degrees or certificates about pc's but I know enough to run my own little business..I can build a pc blindfolded.. and I can walk someone through several basic trouble shooting steps while playing video games( or anything else but looking at my script) I'm surrounded by pcs ALL day... its my passion... work all day and play all night.. basically the only time i'm not infront of a pc is because I'm driving to/from work or taking time with freinds(which is maybe twice a week)

But there are several people around me who have degrees.. A+ N+ CCNA, MCSE... but this is a secure job.. no chance of going under.. and its steady pay.. just about everyone here does their own side work... Myself I like to specialize in Wireless networks. I/O device installs, Opt drives and anythin that has to do with media conversion and burning, I do some modes for people.. got my 80mm hole drill bit and a cordless 18v drill ... plus every day I'm asking questions here and other places about new types of media that I play with. And if you read my sig ... I go above and beyond to convert files to do anything I want.

But I'm glad we have someone here to explain what is going on behind the scenes... who understands ques... and that if your on hold its because we are supporting other people and that we will be with you as soon as possible. Though our que rarely grows to more than 20-25 and my boss is always screaming at us with a que update. But we have hundreds of operators here.. 24-7 in/out/lunch we always keep the available agent # cosntant to the days predicted amount based on the previous 5 years. Some days we are bogged down and some days its light. Any way... good see your comments

 

[Tal-N]

Its always nice to see others within the industry appreciate the effort I'm going to, thanks for your kind words. One thing I did miss in reguards to the myths about Acer support is that we don't use scripts of any kind. Theres no flow charts to diagnose issues over the phone and we're never told to say a certain sequence of phrases during out training. Thats why when you call up the helpline you'll get greetings ranging from "Good Morning, this is the Acer technical support line can I take your serial number please?" to the very basic, "Hi your through to Acer, my name is <name> how can I help you?"

I do know that some callcentres basically hire people with no technical knowledge to simply diagnose using flow charts but frankly I find that to actually cause more problem than it solves. Someone with experience would instantly know what the problem is the second they hear the symptoms or at least have an idea what kind of problem they are dealing with.

But I'll keep watching this topic, see if anyone else has an issue I might be able to shed some light on in the future.

 

[jmcrorie]

Were you ever able to find a replacement screen from a source OTHER than Acer? The LCD screen on my Aspire 2010 broke too and I wasn't willing to pay the $649 to have them replace it.

 

[mderbyshire]

Hello all.

I just wanted to share my experiences with Acer / Esplex repair service. I'll set it out in individual steps so I can easily outline any issues I had along the way, and make it easier to read.

PROBLEM / INITIAL CONTACT:

My Acer laptop developed a crack near the hinge on it's lid. Fortunately I took out 3 year extended warranty when I purchased the laptop. Getting through to Acer on the phone, and acquiring the Case ID, was really quite simple. I was on hold for no longer than around 5 minutes. The man on the phone was exceptionally polite, and even said he would even book me in as a priority (I expect this is due to the fact that I took out the extended warranty?).

ARRANGING COLLECTION OF LAPTOP:

This is the only part of the whole process where I experienced any issues at all - and the issue was with CityLink (the courier), not with Esplex. I could never get through to CityLink on the phone. When I tried to call, it would either keep on ringing and there would be no answer, or it'd be busy. I even made use of the ringback service sowhen their line became available I was alerted, and could ring back immediatley. However, I still had no luck getting through.

In the end, I decided to email CityLink via their feedback form on their website explaining the problems I was having geting through to them. To my surprise I received a reply early the next morning (it might've been the same day except I emailed them on a Sunday). A kind lady at CityLink explained that she was very sorry for the issues I was having getting through to them via the phone, and admitted they were having issues keeping up with the vastly increased number of phone calls they had been receiving recently, for parcel collections. She assured me if I provided her with a reference number (the Case ID which Acer had assigned to me), she would arrange to have my laptop collected the very next day. I did as she asked, and the very next day my parcel was collected.

RECEIVING THE LAPTOP BACK:

Early this morning CityLink delivered my laptop back to me. Upon opening the box I had received an engineers report which explained what had been done to the laptop. They had replaced the entire outer casing of my laptops lid (which is exactly what I had hoped for). I also received a form to fill out, and return (in a prepaid envelope) to the Explex quality co-ordinator, to let them know how happy I had been with their repair service.

I have tested the laptop, and everything appears to be in order.

The only (and very minor) gripe I have with the repair is that the enginner had left the little rubber bits off , which cover up the screws on the laptops lid. However, he had stuck them next to the holes, so it was just a case of me removing them and sticking them back in the right place. It took me all of about 15 seconds to do all 4 of them. I expect he simply forgot. This did not bother me in the slightest.

CONCLUSION:

The laptop was returned, fully repaired, exactly one week from the date of collection. The enginners report clearly states that they had received the laptop on the 26th (one day after it had been collected), and they had carried out the repair on the 28th. In my opinion, the repair was carried out very promptly.

The reason for me explaining all of this is because I had read this thread before sending off my laptop, and due to all the complains I had heared of, I was slightly worried I might've had a similar experience. I am happy to report this was not the case, and I have received first class service from both Acer and Esplex, their repair centre.

I do not doubt that some of you may have received less than satisfactory service from Acer/Esplex, but I think it's important that anyone reading this should be aware that not everyone is receiving bad service.

Hopefully I will have no more issues with my laptop, but if I do, and it happens within the warranty period, I will not hesitate to send my laptop to Esplex for another repair. I would also not hesitate to purchase another Acer laptop, or indeed any of their other products, in the future.

I do in fact also have a 19" Acer TFT monitor, which I have no issues with as yet (touch wood).

Thank you all for reading.

 

[Tal-N]

I have to admit that Citylink's main number is a little tough to get through too. If you have any issues making contact with them and you have a courier reference number of either 902338 or 902357 then you can alternatively call back to Acer/Esplex and see if the agent is able to book your parcel online. Its not something we're encouraged to do because it ties up the phoneline but it can be done. Alternatively you can try contacting the Plymouth branch of Citylink as they hold all the Esplex account information and are able to book jobs however they can be equally busy at times and its really not something they're contracted to do, but if its quiet they're happy to help sometimes. The agents typically won't know that the plymouth CL branch can book collections however so don't be surprized if they don't offer it as an alternative unless you call back.