Almost all onsite support contracts from system manufacturers contain some weasel words to the effect that the decision to actually send a tech to your site is at the manufacturer's discretion. But how extreme do your circumstances have to be before they agree to actually provide the onsite support you paid for? To judge by one reader's recent experience with Alienware at least, it would seem that the more you need onsite support, the less likely you are to receive it.
While support horror stories are regular fare here on the GripeLog, this one is somewhat atypical in that the victim is not an anonymous voice crying in the wilderness. Cem Kaner is a professor of software engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology, director of its Center for Software Testing Education & Research, and a software industry veteran. My longtime readers know that he's also an attorney, a leading voice in the fight against UCITA, and the author of a book -- Bad Software -- that explains how to deal with recalcitrant technology vendors. So he's rather uniquely qualified for the battle he's found himself engaged in with Alienware in recent months.
On his Bad Software website, Kaner is in the process of documenting the entire painful saga in great detail. In August last year he bought an Alienware Roswell 3150 system that was preconfigured with the Matrox RTX100 Extreme Pro video card for an on-line video courseware project he was working on. The price of the system, including $299 for a "3-Year AlienCare Toll-Free 24/7 Phone Support with Onsite Service" service contract, was substantially higher than he might have paid for a similar system from another vendor, but product reviews he read convinced him Alienware had the product quality and support he required. "I appreciate good quality," wrote Kaner. "I cherish good quality. I understand that quality costs money, and so I accept the fact that if I want something really good, I'll have to pay for it."
After months of shipping difficulties and performance problems that he wrestled with using Alienware's online resources, Kaner was far from happy with his system. He was pleased, however, when in April Alienware took the initiative to contact him to inform him of a conflict between the Matrox card and his RAID controller. "I was in fact so pleased that in a purchasing decision we were just making at Florida Tech, I chose to get an Alienware system for the school rather a different company's machine," he wrote. "In retrospect, that was a silly mistake."
At first, Kaner thought it would be a matter of simply swapping out the controller for a new one, so he agreed to do it himself. But he soon discovered that he was actually having to rebuild the computer piece by piece, moving the Matrox card and re-wiring cables in ways that were severely taxing his time and his manual dexterity. As the hours he was spending working on his non-operational computer turned into days and then weeks, he repeatedly demanded that Alienware honor his onsite service contract and send someone to do the work that was beyond him.
"In the course of attempting to repair this computer, I spent hours on the phone with Alienware's tech, swapping the locations of boards, replacing a board, reformatting the hard disk, reloading all of the software on the disk and so on," Kaner wrote. "I protested repeatedly during my calls with him that this was inappropriate, that I was not skilled at this work, and that I thought such things as board replacement and rebuilding the system would normally be handled by Alienware's technicians. He insisted that I act as, in effect, the onsite technician."
The only alternative Alienware would offer him to serving as his own technician was to ship the computer off to their repair depot. "I needed this computer for work that had to be done in late April and early May -- shipping it away was just out of the question," Kaner wrote. "That's the problem with mail-away support and why people buy expensive service contracts. The response to my statements that I expected onsite support were that the service contract makes it a matter of their determination whether I am entitled to onsite support, phone support or depot support, and they determined that onsite support was unnecessary."
But if you're not entitled to onsite support to fix hardware that's known to be defective, when would you ever get it? I contacted Alienware a few weeks ago to ask if they could explain their support policies in this regard, and their spokesperson said they would get back to me. They haven't, and my subsequent calls have gone unreturned.
In the meantime, Kaner has escalated his battle with Alienware far past the demand for onsite support. I recommend that you keep an eye on his chronicle, because when finished I believe it will serve as a very valuable resource on how to deal with ugly warranty support situations. In fact, I'm going to offer him a title for it: Bad Hardware Encounters of the Alienating Kind.
Read and post comments about this story here.
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