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(Image: ZDNet)
While the holidays are supposed to be about relaxation and spending time with family, they can often be stressful — and nothing is worse than having to deal with adverse customer satisfaction issues in retail during an extremely hectic time of year.
In particular, it really stinks when your computer dies during the holidays, and you have to bring it to a big box store for repair (especially when you have to go to the mall, when everyone is out shopping, and it’s an utter madhouse having to deal with traffic and parking).
One of the retail stores that I have routinely had good support experiences with during the holidays has been Apple. Despite the fact that I have had my issues with the company over the decades, I have always valued their personal touch and their desire to do what is right for the customer within reason.
So, when my best friend of over 30 years, Mark, called me on the phone to wish me a Happy Thanksgiving holiday and describe his tale of woe to me, I was utterly stunned.
Mark, who lives in Long Island, N.Y., where we both grew up, had an issue with his 2013-era MacBook Pro. Specifically, he noticed the anti-glare coating on his screen was deteriorating.
After consulting with customer support on the phone, Apple acknowledged it was a known issue and instructed him to bring it to his local Apple retail location at the Walt Whitman Mall, where they would repair it free of charge.
Great. Right? Well, not so great.
The long and short of the story is that after five — now going on six — separate visits to the store, the laptop came back in worse condition than it arrived.
An incompetent bench technician fried the main logic board and the I/O board while re-assembling the machine, and the store blamed the problem on a third-party Broadcom Wi-Fi module that Mark had swapped out with the OEM original.
Keep in mind the original reason for the visit: The screen glass needed replacement due to a defective anti-glare coating. There was no reason to mess with the system logic.
He now has a computer that has no functioning Wi-Fi and is being asked to pay $134-plus in parts for a machine that Apple is going to refuse to service in two months time, because Apple only supports systems for five years.
Oh, and the icing on the cake? The case clamshell is no longer correctly aligned.
Also, after opening up the system to put back the OEM Wi-Fi card (as requested by his CSR before Apple could resume work on his computer), my friend discovered that the internal cabling was not re-installed correctly and that a short — due to an incorrectly re-installed power supply by the bench technician — may have damaged the system, which they are now asking him to pay additional money to repair.