HI i bought a laptop for >1k pounds last year.
Its still under warranty and 2 months ago, the HDD died (no longer detected by BIOS)
Sent an email and after a week got a reply by customer support.
Called to extend warranty (still has a year on it but wanted to extend to 3 years)
Told that I will have to buy a warranty from 3rd party and wait for it before sending my laptop for repair
Bought extension from ebuyer
Couldnt register the warranty extension as the repair centre on the box no longer exists!
Contacted sony again. Told to take a picture of it. Offered to give S/N or email immediately but told it will take them time anyway.
1 whole month later no news.
So called them again. Told that they will look into it.
Received an email asking for my email address, name and laptop serial number (which they already had but fine... i sent it again)
No reply for 2 weeks.
Called them again. Told that they will now escalate it and call me back in 2 hours.
They didnt.
Called the next day again. Now told to call the repair centre so i can register the warranty myself.
Called the repair centre. Told that they were no longer working with Sony since a year ago!
Called Sony again. Told me that they will escalate it (deja vu).
Told him i was fed up of doing their post telephone survey giving good marks for a terrible job.
Arranged a collection via phone... person was very rude said someone will pick it up tomorrow. Did not offer me to do survey this time and cut me off.
Got a text saying DPD is coming to ?deliver my sony Vaio...
Now... if they are sending a 3rd party courier to collect it why the heck did they not tell me how they want it packed and to whom do i send it to?
so, i will have to call them again... this time i will lie and tell them they are good over the phone, let them put me through to the satisfaction survey but in the survey i will report these problems.
My main concerns regarding how Sony runs their support department
1) Email response is slow (there is no quality or time control over their email responses)
2) Phone response is generally good but the support workers probably get paid by how good their customer satisfaction survey scores are. This creates a few problems (a) they can decide whether to offer the customer to fill in the survey or not.... if they are doing it badly, they just put down the phone (b) they probably give very good lip service but nothing gets done (I will escalate the case, will call you back later in the day, will email you, promise to contact you in 4 hours... all these things i have heard) AND they probably do this so that they get a good score on the survey. empty promises.
3) THERE IS NO COMPLAINTS DEPT I CAN FIND. so everything is probably run and shut down in-house.
SONY makes great products. Customer support in the UK is unfortunately dire. will never recommend sony again until management changes.
