Impressed by service!

[Dragonblaster]

My Sony Vaio VGN-FE41m w/ Vista Ultimate was having all sorts of problems with BSODs. Finally, I tried to update the BIOS (Windows only, of course, so no boot disks) and I had a crash in the middle of the update.

That was it. My laptop was doing a pretty good impression of a tea-tray, with all the computing power thereof.

Online. I'd read real horror stories about Sony's service being appalling, that they refused to carry out work under warranty, that they always wiped your HDD, that they denied receiving the goods, that they said they'd sent them but they never arrived...

As it was, within two days of posting my woes on the Club Vaio forum, I received an unsolicited phone call from Vaio Service asking if they could arrange collection of my defunct notebook to repair it. I was only to happy to agree. The chap did ask if they could wipe the HDD, but I had a fairly recent backup, so I said OK.

DHL took it away when they said they'd arrive, and I was able to track its progress online.

After arrival at the repair facility, I got an email to confirm receipt and that work was about to start. Then, a week later, I got a phone call to say the work was finished and my machine was on its way back to me. This I was able to verify again from DHL's website.

The receipt was a little delayed due to the Easter holiday long weekend, but it arrived back in good nick... with the HDD as it was before and a new mobo.

I got another phone call to ask if I'd got it, and I pointed out that a blanking plug was missing. The chap said he'd get one straight out to me.

The laptop works absolutely fine now, and I haven't had a BSOD since I got it back.

I am to say the least very much pretty impressed with the quality of the service!

[Blencogo]

Hi Dragonblaster,

Thank you for posting your positive experience with Sony Vaio-Link Support.

It is refreshing to hear about the occasions where Sony get it right because there will always be a bias toward negative comments on a forum such as this. Many members only come here when they have a problem.

A big thank you to Steven and the Vaio-Link Support Team.

[Thalamus.]

A happy post..

Glad to hear that you good service from Vaio-Link Support, as Blencogo has already said it's nice to hear positive comments..

Good job Vaio Link..

You can read Drangonblaster earlier Dead BIOS recovery? thread HERE

[Karlo206]

Dragonblaster, that is in deed a good story. Additionally good on you for posting your response, many complain but few praise!

Unfortunitely for every story like yours there are 10 stories about Sony support being exceptionally poor. I work with client service software and personnal and it is a very tough job, but as an IT technician when you deal with support personal who often clearly are only interested in meeting their support SLA's (software licensing agreements), it is pretty disheartening. As an example many companies insist their queries are met within a particular timeframe. As such you will have your initial query met with a generic reply within the space of a day, however any follow up questions can take up to three days to be answered...

From an open minded point of view however, I have had a few responses from Sony support and have had close to no luck receiving any help from them. All my issues had been resolved either by myself spending countless hours on internet forums, or from other users on this site and other user forums. Users can function like this, businesses can't, which explains why Dell and HP dominate the business market.

An example of customer service gone right. My brother's Acer laptop crashed. An Acer service representative came to our front door to pick up the laptop, sent it off to examined and returned a fixed laptop within the space of a week... This is standard support from a company that sells their laptops and 'service' with laptops.

On this forum the search functionality doesn't even work, so we are essentially left at the mercy of kind and compasionate users to help us out. Surely this is a blatant example of a company that does not place a great deal of emphasis on customer care?

Either way, good on you for posting your personal experience with Sony, it is in deed refreshing to hear someone with a good story for a change.