09 February 2010

Gateway Customer Support (Not!)

I had to call the Gateway customer support line this afternoon. 1-866-539-3901. This was one of those increasingly popular with companies and increasingly frustrating to customers voice recognition robot system.

Voice recognition robots are still not ready for prime time. The old school phone tree system where you entered numbers from multiple choices worked better. Voice recognition robots are certainly not ready to have you read 22 digit alphanumeric serial numbers to them.

Unhappy? The robot informs you that talking to a human being is simply not an option, gives you a website, and hangs up on you.

Needless to say, any human being at a customer support desk unable to translate voice to letters and numbers, and unable to interact beyond hanging up on you, would be fired on the spot. But, Gateway doesn't aspire to this kind of customer service one would expect from a human being with ten minutes of training.

2 comments:

Dave Barnes said...

Apple has humans to talk with.

I'm just saying.

Jay Diggs said...

They did the same to me. I wanted to find out about getting my laptop repaired because it has a serious safety hazard and they said pretty much "Oh well it is out of warranty". When I tried to contact them through their chat contact thing they told me the same thing, and that I need to take it to a local technician. When I asked the person if Gateway covers it they disconnected from the chat. I thought Sprint had bad customer service, holy crap!