Need Urgent Advice about PC WORLD and Disgusting cutomer service

rhythmsoup

For the original poster. Let us know how you get on, did you get your machine returned to you?

Bluediamond

Hello everyone !
just to let you know that the day after I sent the letters to the manager of PC World, he left a pathetic grovelling message on my voicemail telling me I can collect it today ( Friday ) and he will call me tomorrow ( Saturday) to discuss
THANK YOU all for your comments and advice. I still have not heard from the DSGi head office and I will NOT GIVE UP. Will keep you all posted
MANY THANKS AGAIN...PC WORLD Should be shut down in my eyes !
Sally

droopsnoot

On the subject of proving whether they've changed the motherboard, "it depends". We sell Fujitsu machines, and all the components in the machine have a serial number which usually matches the number of the whole PC. So if it's the same, chances are you haven't had a new motherboard. If it's different, the manufacturer (depending on who it is) might be able to show records of what was in it when it was new.

As for their service, I don't think many of the people that work there are actually involved in doing the repairs and/or diagnosis. While there's no excuse for them making stuff up, they may well be clueless rather than deliberately deceiving you. I guess PCW is like any other large store - there will be people there who should not be in full-time employment, and there will be some good ones too. The trick is finding the good ones.

Richie-from-the-Boro

droopsnoot, you make a very important point [ repairs and/or diagnosis ] on the retail PCW staff.

If you are in the industry you know the repair company in question. They do all major outlets in each regional area including PCW, Curry's, et al, it's a massive operation.

The two points I was making were that :

- changing a lappie MOBO uneconomic, more cost effective to do a ' swap out ' and sell the broken one to a ' del boy ' ( blown cap = 8p & labour ) ( MOBO £50 & same labour costs )

- always quote the maximum [ MOBO replacement ] to get the most man hours labour per unit benefit / income.

This is not the small honourable business the like of yours and mine, it's a volume throughput, accountant based operation with very little integrity or skill base.

As for the PCW retail staff they are what they are, it's not really their fault, they are underpaid with a lousy basic, they rely on selling ' bolt on bits ' for each product to make enough commission to live on. Very little in / out house training is provided hence the lack of product knowledge. The wage / bonus structure means that the staff motivation is geared around cables, batteries, and memory sticks.

In a sentence the individual salesperson makes nowt selling a £1200 quid tele but does make commission on a £12 HDMi cable, so his / her motivation is to sell batteries, cables, memory stix etc !

tomsolomon

I have PC world to thank for one thing I suppose.....
If they hadn't screwed me over on a laptop, I wouldn't have gone to college for three years to learn how to fix my own computers.......

amcluesent

IIRC the 'engineers' at PC World also download anything that looks interesting off your hard-drive.

poppy10_2

amcluesent wrote: »

IIRC the 'engineers' at PC World also download anything that looks interesting off your hard-drive.

Yep. That's how they got Gary Glitter and some other similar creeps. Fair enough, those guys deserved it, but it's a bit dodgy that PC World staff routinely snoop through your hard drive.
Also there's this story from the Daily Mail:

A PC World repairman in Brentford, West London, told the investigators that the computer 'needed a new motherboard', costing £230.

When the computer was collected, only the memory chip (which was not faulty) had been replaced.

spaceman5

not a problem as such, but i purchased a wireless printer from them yesterday, at till the woman asked if i wanted to by a cable that you need to connect it to the computer, then she realised it was wireless and stopped in there tracks(i reralise i will probably need the cable to set it up, but could use the one from my old printer), anyway got it home opened box, what was first thing i saw, u guessed it the cable, they would try to sell sand to the arabs if they could

peterx

Avoid PC World like the plague,support local PC shops.Ive had great service from my local pc shop.

Bluediamond

Update for all you kind people who helped with advice. The letters of complaint that I wrote to head office of PC World were acknowledged. The manager of the store called me all weekend and I finally summoned up the courage to walk through the PC World doors yesterday to confront him face to face. He went through my letter, agreed that they had given a disgusting service and apologised profusely. He pointed out that the data was my responsibility and that although they took it all off for me onto a disk, it should have been me that did that !. He has refunded my son £50 of ITunes Vouchers for the music files that were lost ( when they restored it back to factory settings) and has given me a years Norton Gold Software. I was happy to leave it at that. I had made my point and his final words to me were, " I hope we will see you again madam" to which I replied "Never!"