Customers--What's Loyalty Worth?

A couple of years ago Hewlett-Packard offered my college age son what seemed like a good deal. The warranty on his laptop was expiring (if you’ve EVER owned a laptop without a warranty, I’m sure you have cursed yourself for that oversight) and for the nominal fee of $250 they would sell him a warranty for two more years.
Trust me, on a laptop that’s a decent deal. So he sent in $250 of his limited funds and got the extended company warranty good through October, 2010. At least that’s what the paperwork in his hand says. A few days ago he was having trouble with his mouse pad and decided to invoke the warranty.
He called Hewlett-Packard. They denied all knowledge of such a warranty. Said it couldn’t possibly be. He brought out his credit card record showing that Hewlett-Packard accepted his money. They passed him on to someone else.
He went through the explanation again. He got passed on to someone else. This person passed him back to the first person—who passed him on to yet someone else. Each time he was put on hold for as much as ten or fifteen minutes before being passed on.
After three hours they gave him yet another number to call. It was dinner time and he gave up for the day. But he and his mother did check out a blog site on Hewlett-Packard. It seems a whole lot of people who bought similar extended warrantees from HP are having the same problems.
Interminable waits on hold, being passed back and forth, denial of all knowledge, a purported “supervisor” who obviously is not—and so forth.
Sometimes a problem with customer service is obviously—even on this end of the phone—a problem of too many people having been laid off, leaving survivors overwhelmed. (I’ve talked about the local grocery manager who transferred to a different department—“They doubled my product and cut my staff in half”.)
Sometimes a company is so frantic to save money that it appears to repent of its own foolishness in making promises (or selling warranties) that now, in more straitened circumstances, it has no plans to keep. So it ducks, dodges and weaves.
Hewlett-Packard makes an excellent machine. It sells, by far, the most computers of any company in the world. Perhaps they feel the quality of their product trumps any need for good customer relations—or even merely honest ones?
(General Motors thought that way once—when it had over 50% of the American market. Seemingly, Toyota has come to think that way in the past decade or so. My wife worked part time at a major retail chain a few years back. She recalls that the company attitude went from “Anything to make the customer happy” to “forget service—get them out of the door”. Associates who didn’t make that transition fast enough were penalized.)
I recall an elderly man I met years ago. During the Depression, when no building supplier in his right mind was giving contractors any credit, he offered credit to his good customers. He carried them for months, even for years. When I met him, decades after the Depression was over, he was a very rich man with a stable of loyal customers.
Just read a piece on Singapore Airlines. When carriers all over the world are charging you for luggage, cutting back on food, drinks and amenities, Singapore is not. Service remains full. Luxury remains luxury. They—in contrast to lot of other airlines, are doing nicely.
There is a passage in the Bible that says, “Do unto others as you wish they would do to you.” It will no doubt make you virtuous and well liked. It just might also make you rich.
Next time we look at computers, do you suppose we just might look at somebody else’s line? What about all those other bloggers out there—who can’t seem to locate anyone who knows anything about their extended warranties?