Beyond my Expectations for Customer Service

As promised here is my blog post about my computer repair experience. 

We bought a new HP tower computer from Costco last November.  When we replaced it, the desktop was 11 years old.  Thursday night the monitor was not receiving input from the computer.

Monday morning, I called the Costco Concierge number.  I spent about 10 minutes on the phone as that technician debugged and then he called the HP technician.  This was on Columbus Day, BTW. 

I spent about 20 minutes on the phone with HP, and the whole time the Costco tech was still on the call.  They were going to have me ship the tower to HP and have a turn around of 14 days but I pushed back and said, "I would rather have a tech come and do it here."  "Oh, for $50, we can send a tech out."  This was the only bad part of my experience, why did they not suggest that solution first? 

At the end of the call, the Costco rep said he would set up a tickler to call me in a week to see if everything worked out OK.  I was delighted at their pro activity.

Monday after our call, they Fedexed the new mother board, it got here Tuesday at 11am and at 3:31 pm, a tech called to see he if could come over and install the new motherboard.  I watched very carefully and actually think I can do this next time.

So, from Monday morning at 9am until Tuesday afternoon at 4:30 was the length of this repair cycle, which included the Fedex from TX.

This is not my experience of computer repair in the past.  Although it has been 11 years since we bought a new desktop. 

In the past, I would have had to ship it, or take it in somewhere.  I had already looked on Yelp to see which computer repair places I might have to bring it to.

Have things really changed that much that this kind of service is routine?  I hope so.  Shout outs to Kevin at Costco, Ed (I think) at HP and the tech who installed it, Cuong P.  I am a very delighted user, again, of the HP tower computer. 

The iPad can do a lot but there are certain things, like reading a CD for the class I was teaching last night, that it just does not do.