We automatically pay for next-business-day onsite support for all our machines. I have had cause recently to access this twice, with two different companies.
Company 1 (machine has what I suspect is a dodgy fan): will only send out an engineer after they have got you to run diagnostic tests of various sorts. Then they will know what to send the engineer along with. I kind of see where they’re coming from, but tbh what I really want is for me to make the phone call*, and for an engineer to appear the next day with a boot full of Relevant Hardware, diagnose, and fix.
Company 2 (machine losing time, motherboard being replaced): phone not working, send email. Response to email beautiful fast, we agree that the losing of time in itself isn’t disastrous but may signify something more serious, so they’ll replace the chassis. Radio silence for the next 2 days (apparently someone phoned on my day out of the office, but since I warned them that I would be out of the office, they should really have emailed). It transpires that in this instance, NBD means “we will ship the replacement parts & then send an engineer the NBD after they arrive”. So that’s minimum 2 BDs. Again, my expectation is that the engineer should bring the parts with them. (And the lack of information on this annoys me rather more.)
My assumption is that this is to do with centralised this-and-that: that engineers are based in Place A and parts in Place B (where Place B may in fact be out of the country, or even the continent in extreme cases). But it doesn’t actually meet what I want from NBD, though I expect it meets the contract. Am I expecting too much?
(I feel I should note that once I actually get an engineer onsite, they are invariably extremely competent, fast, and hardworking. My complaint is not with any of them!)
* Ideally, for me to send an email, but I will settle for phone.
Original post by Juliet Kemp
