Most of us have dealt with poor customer service. I remember one particular episode with Shaw that prompted me to change to MTS.  But nothing I have ever experienced  compares to the bad service I have gotten from HP Remote Services.

https://secure.hpremoteservices.com/HP/home/index.as

http://h30617.www3.hp.com/home/

I started this service back in July to provide me with both online backup of my files and with technical support for my computer. This service costs $25/month. As well, this service provides virus protection. It sounds like a good price for all that service.

I saw red flags right from the start. I should have paid attention to them.

HP services gives you a direct number for calling a so-called-technician. Most of the time, this technician is located in India and has a strong accent. It has been my experience that these technicians have as much computer knowledge as I do, but not one bit more. I should have figured this out after my initial contact with one of these technicians and he kept me on the phone for well over an hour, mostly doing shut downs and reboots and not getting any closer to solving my problem.

Fortunately, HP does have qualified people who are called senior people but one has to make an appointment to speak to them. That would be fine with me, except for the pain of getting by the initial junior person who spends an inordinate amount of useless time trying to solve whatever problem  you have. It would also be fine if the appointment time was kept.

After the initial backup of my computer, I never thought to check to see if the automatic backups were happening. My fault, I know. I should have checked. There is also a virus protection with this program. I never checked it either. I’ve had other virus protection systems on my computer and when the automatic scans didn’t  work, a window would pop up alerting me to this fact. No window popped up to tell me that my virus protection was not up to date and my automatic backups were not in place. I was not alerted by email either.

I finally checked  a week ago and noticed that I had never had a backup after the initial one and that my virus protection was not updated.  That means 6 months of data has not been backed up and I have not had the proper virus protection in all that time.

I immediately phoned the number that was given to me. Of course I had to explain the problem to someone who couldn’t help me. After about half an hour, I was given an appointment for a senior person. Please note that this was on Jan. 6th and today is the 13th.

I was given an appointment for the 7th at 10:00 am. That would have worked well, except the call came at 8:22, followed by one  at 8:31, and another one shortly after 9:00.  I was not free to take those calls so I had missed the appointment.

Fine, I phoned for another appointment and was given one on the 8th at 10:00. This time the call came shortly after 11:00 but I was not able to stay at home and wait for the call.

I again phoned for another appointment and this time was given one at 1:00 pm. I finally got a call at 3:30, after sending customer service a few emails.

Troy, the man I spoke was considerably more knowledgeable and seemed to know how to go about fixing my problem. The first step was getting a password for my account as I couldn’t remember my password. This in itself sounds simple. We all forget passwords at times. It’s usually a fairly simple process of retrieving it or getting a new one. Not with this company. It has been a week and I still cannot access my account. I still do not have online backups happening and my virus protection is still out of date.

After Troy figured out the problem with getting a new password, he said he would contact me with the  new password link but it would take 48 hours. Bizarre as that may seem, it was what I was told. However, to my surprise it only took an hour. Unfortunately, I was not home when Troy called back, but he clearly stated in his message that someone would call me back.

That was 3 days ago. Nobody has called me back.

I still do not have a password for my account.

I still do not have online backup.

I still do not have updated virus protection.

So today, I took a deep breath and phoned the customer service number again. The first person I spoke to indicated that he would get a message to Troy and get him to call me back within the hour. I waited about an hour and a half and nobody called.

Another deep breath and another call. This time, I was told that there was in fact no message for me to be called in my account. Which meant that I had to explain the whole problem to another junior person. The call got dropped.

You would think that I would be called back after the call got dropped. NOT!

I tried calling back twice, only to get elevator music.

At this point, there is only one way for me to cancel this service (which is in fact no service at all) and that is to cancel my credit card. Which I will be doing, once I change the other automatic payments on it. Which is a pain. But much less of a pain that trying to get some “service” from HP Customer Service.