"Customer service"

Names not used to protect the guilty. We have a motherboard that we bought about 2 years ago now. It was used to run 5310 processors for a build machine for a while. Well, the fist motherboard we had from them, while advertised as compatible with quad core … wasn’t. We had to RMA it to get the right version from this vendor. Well, we had to upgrade the bios recently to support a new card we placed in the machine. And the bios update bricked the machine. Well, stuff happens. But this isn’t the problem.

We sent the motherboard back for repair. Basically it needed a replacement bios. Thats it. And we got it back. Good, right? Well … not quite. Now, this motherboard will not boot correctly with quad core cpus. Yes, you read that right. Ok, this is annoying, but easily fixable. All they have to do is exchange this motherboard for the one they took from us … which had the correct chipset modifications, for the quad core support. Thats it. Nothing more. Its been 2 months, and they are arguing with us over this. They sent bios updates. We installed. Did not work. Explained the situation to them. They don’t quite get it. I suspect now, that this is not accidental. Did I mention that this is a $300 motherboard? Sadly there are very limited choices in the motherboard space. Very limited. Contemplating options here. We have been and are being heavily courted by a competitor of theirs. Their competitor motherboards have had problems. And an amazingly responsive technical support group that helped us work through problems quickly. Ok. Customer calls us up and tells us we have a problem with a unit. We work through a set of tests to attempt to isolate the problem to the smallest subsystem we can, and we make a critical decision. Do we walk the customer through the rest of the “cure” if possible, or do we exchange the “failed” part? We engage the customer in this decision process, and they let us know what they prefer. And this is what we do. Because good happy customers tend to be good happy returning customers. The folks courting us know this. The folks wasting our time by not fixing the problem they caused … don’t quite grasp this.