• Dear Palm, Inc.,

    Posted on January 30th, 2006 by and currently 2 commenting.

    Your gadgets are cool. But your customer service is not. Yesterday I was setting up a friends new Treo and trying to get it to talk to her Mac so it could setup the email from Entourage. I called her provider, Verizon (which – surprisingly – got me to a real, pleasant person in a very short time) who then connected me to Palm support. I could hardly understand the first guy who made me feel like an idiot and then, after about three minutes, hung up in the middle of the sentence.

    So I tried for a while to figure it out myself. And I almost did, but still had a few questions. I couldn’t find a number to call on the Palm website, so I called Verizon again and told the guy that Palm “accidentally” hung up on me, to which he replied as he laughed, “No comment.” After talking to him for a while, he gave me the number for Palm support. I called the not-so-toll-free number and was greeted by a woman who asked me what my problem was. She transferred me to Mac support and – I kid you not – they proceeded to be put on hold for 24 minutes. On my dime. And then they just hung up on me before I even spoke to someone.

    I’m not a complainer. And I don’t use blogs to whine and get my way. Palm has remarkable products, but unremarkable customer service. Can they survive on just remarkable products and still treat their customers this way? Can any company?

  • http://thebrandbuilder.blogspot.com/ Olivier Blanchard

    Survive, yes. For a while. Thrive, nope.

  • http://www.thepowerofinfluence.com/ Ian McKee

    Hi Spike Your friend made a great choice with the Treo, and I have lots of friends who have their Treo and Macs co-habiting very happily. Sad to hear the story about poor service – I must counted however with my own experience of EXCELLENT (I don’t use caps lightly) customer service here in Asia. For various reasons (being dropped in soup being one) I have had hardware troubles with my 600 (I was an early adopter) a couple of times. A single phone call gets me a Replacement number – I take the number to a convenient store on Orchard Road (downtown Singapore) and I get a 1 for 1 replacement. No questions. No forms. No wait. No fuss. The experience is as near perfect as you can get. I love the product and the support that I have found myself giving demos to stranger in taxi queues about it – and about 15% of my close circle of friend and family are now Treo converts.