Trouble with Palm Technical Support

[mthielbar]

Has anyone else had trouble getting help from Palm Technical Support?

I bought my fiance a Palm for Christmas. Two days out of the box, it started resetting itself randomly, so we called technical support. It was under warranty, and they told us they'd send a shipping label in the mail so we could mail the Palm to them, and they could fix it.

Weeks went by. We never heard from them. When we called again, they admitted that they'd forgotten about sending the mailing label. Then, however, they said our warranty had expired while we were waiting on them, so they couldn't fix the Palm Pilot.

We were rather upset. We sent another notice to technical support. Other than an e-mail assuring us they were "taking this very seriously" and a garbled message on my fiance's answering machine, we've heard nothing from them, despite our repeated efforts to get an update on what was happening.

I want to give Palm the benefit of the doubt and assume this is just a case of several people making several mistakes, but a few of my family members have been asking me for suggestions on which PDA they should buy. I don't want them to go through what we went through, but I really like my Palm.

Has anyone else had experience with Palm technical support? Was it a good one or a bad one?

Thank you,
Melinda Thielbar

[Stupenal]

Palm technical support is by far one of the worst. They contract a company internationally, I am assuming India, to handle their technical support. In turn, when you call their number, they are transfering you all the way to India. This results in poor phone quality connection and also it is very hard to understand sometimes what they are saying. Their accents are very strong and they are often not willing to help. Obtaining service request numbers is very difficult and they treat you like you made the mistake and broke the item somehow, or the item is not broken and you are just too dumb to figure out how to use it.

At first I thought it was just a fluke that everytime I called, it was answered by someone of Indian descent. However, the successive times I've called I realized that Palm can't even hire Americans to do the job. Instead those jobs are being transferred overseas. :(

[DrMud]

I had a very similar experience. After three phone calls I was given the address to ship the Palm into. When service was in Canada it was top notch.
I was not contacted by email to give a satisdfaction report. You don't suppose they already know its bad!?
Doc

[mthielbar]

I'm both glad and sorry to hear I'm not the only one having these problems. I love using my Palm Pilot, but I guess I can't reccomend them to anyone in my family. If my father had to make three phone calls to get his Palm fixed, we'd find the thing in someone's ear.

I guess that means I'm not upgrading to a Tungsten in the Fall, either.

Thanks, Everyone,
Melinda

[DrMud]

The most disturbing thing is that Palm did have better service than they do now.
Two years ago if you owned a SONY running Palm OS the service was so bad Palm look like heaven by comparison.
The indication that I see here is that the outsourcing to the other side of the globe has not been successfully linked to the actual warehousing and repair functions in the US. We can only hope that we don't need tech or warranty support and that by the time we do they have made the support seamless.
Doc

PS: My oldest Vx went over three years glitch free.

[CindyM]

Just went through my second term in hell trying to deal with Palm tech support. As pointed out by another person, the tech support is handled out of India (I confirmed this with the person I was trying to talk to). Accent was significant (thanks, I thought it was just me). They couldn't understand my fairly complex (to me) problem, and I couldn't understand them. When I asked for someone who spoke English as a first language, I was told they would try to speak more slowly but there was no US person to talk to. They did offer to put me back in the queue for the next available tech support person (I did that, but it yielded the sme results). Each time I asked a question, the tech support person had to "check with my supervisor". Finally, I asked to speak to the supervisor. The supervisor was totally impossible to understand -- not only the accent, the phone connection. My guess is that the people with the best English skills answer the phone -- not the people with the best knowledge of problem-solving. I spent 1 hr. 20 min. on the phone and never did speak to someone who I could understand easily, and my problem is still unsolved. While Palm may be saving money with Indian tech support, they might as well eliminate tech support altogether and save even more $$ -- the tech support won't be any worse.

[DrMud]

I intend to send this thread to Palm and hope it gets read.
Doc

[mthielbar]

Thanks very much, DrMud.