The Truth from an Ex-Gateway Employee
May 31 '01 (Updated Jul 05 '01)
The Bottom Line Gateway desktops are just like any others; what you need to focus on is support, and Gateway sets the standard in support.
Introduction
I've been reading some of the epinions here on Gateway Desktops and to be honest, a few of them have floored me.
First, what do you expect? It amazes me that most people who tend to drop a bomb on Gateway have absolutely nothing to compare Gateway to. It's their first computer from a major manufacturer. I'm about to give you the skinny on what Gateway is all about, top to bottom, and I might have a couple of reasons for you to trust me.
I worked at Gateway in both Information Technology and Technical Support (for Home Desktop Users). I worked in two locations; at Hampton, Virginia and at Colorado Springs, Colorado. I received more letters of "Thanks" from customers than did anyone on either team I was on (VA or CO) while serving on those teams. I’ve also done bench work on Dells, Microns, Compaqs, and many others as well as your garden-variety Mom&Pop systems. I currently work in Information Technology and I have for 11 years in one form or another. I also own a small PC service business. You can also take an look at what customers have said about my work at expertcity.com by viewing this page: http://www.expertcity.com/servlet/dispatch/browseResume.tmpl?ExpertKey=259178
I know as much about computers as Benjamin Buford Blue knew ‘bout the shrimpin’ business.
I have shaken the hand of the man himself—the one who started the whole thing, Ex-CEO Ted Waitt (Now Chairman of the Board), and I even let him slam-dunk a Nerf basketball into my hoop at my cubicle. Do you know what I said to him (among other things) as he walked through the Hampton Call Center with his entourage following him towards my cubicle as I spoke with a customer and one of my Senior technical support people in a conference? "We're just having some fun tonight," to which he replied, "Good. We're just having some fun too!" That's when he took the shot, missed with a horrible air ball, and followed up with a slam-dunk. Sort of symbolic if you ask me--Ted Waitt and everything in his wake will succeed, no matter how many tries it takes. That’s what Gateway is all about.
Understand first that I have nothing to gain or lose by telling you whatever I want about Gateway. Sure, had I not made the money I thought I deserved or had a bad experience with management then I could get a "dig" or two in by verbally trashing their products and services. But what would that earn me? Or maybe one of their representatives is paying me to polish their image and write an excellent review? Ya think, maybe?
Not. I'll take a polygraph test if you'll pay for it. I'm just honest like that.
What does Gateway specialize in?
Service and support. You don't know how many meetings I went to...how many internal memos I received...how much training I endured...all of it aimed towards pleasing the customer. I have not yet seen any company except for L.L. Bean treat customers as well as Gateway does.
You have to keep in mind that any name brand computer is really a mutt of hardware and software. You have hard drives from Quantum, Western Digital, and Maxtor. You have modems from US Robotics, Aopen, and 3Com. Grab a motherboard from Tyan, GigaByte, or Intel and toss into the mix a video card, sound card, processor, monitor, mouse, keyboard, gamepad, cables, specialty cards and drives from any combination of Creative, ATI, HP, AMD, Elsa, NEC, and yadda yadda yadda, and our soup is almost complete. Now, throw in software from Microsoft, Adobe, Netscape, Ulead Systems, Macromedia, Broderbund, Intuit, Canon, Epson, Kodak, The Learning Company, Rand McNally…ok, you’re getting the picture. What you have here is an unpredictable collection of metal and electrons that you can only HOPE, at best, serves your computing needs without any major repetitive flaws.
How is the soup today?
It is the job of a major manufacturer to try to find good combinations of those things. Gateway, on a broad scale, does this very well. They use advanced testing labs to test setup after setup after setup…they push buttons that don’t need to be pushed and tip things over and scream at their monitors and plug cords in the wrong way and anything else that might disrupt a setup before they market them.
I’ve walked the manufacturing floors of the Hampton facility and watched those hard-working, cheerful people taking great care in how they place parts into the cases. I became friends with many of these people and often had lunch or dinner with groups of them. Many times, if you heard somebody complaining during one of these outings, it wasn’t about management or work conditions. It was about someone on their team who wasn’t pulling their weight or living up to the high expectations that everyone on the floor shared. You could often hear bragging about 99.8% quality reports from individuals who were earning such ratings.
The focus on the floor was all about quality, and I know enough about computing (and having worked in IT there and seeing the manufacturing people at work many times) to tell you that Gateway runs a tight ship, and the technicians would employ the quality policies without any pressure from management. It’s a personal competition for them as well as a job.
Different technicians have different approaches
You bet. You can’t get high quality technicians into a facility and then have them do everything by reading a flowchart no more than you can have a surgeon plop a help manual on a patient’s chest during open heart surgery. Neither is an exact science, and both have far too many variables to etch solutions into a step-by-step procedure. I had the opportunity to work with some of the most skilled technicians in the world while I served at Gateway. I still communicate with many of them…I have good friends from the call center in CO and a great friend, who has been promoted to a manager position in VA. Each of us took our own approach when we took a call, and many times that approach may have been different from a technician who took the call before were it not resolved. That’s the nature of the business and this is skilled labor. The goal is to get to a solution, and you can’t get ticked off if one technician tells you to do something differently than another technician.
Let me tell you that it is a real challenge to walk away from the workbench and pick up a phone. Describe this thingy and that button—“No no, don’t click that one or it’ll reboot, wait, you are running Windows 98SE right, oh, it’s ME, I thought you said SE, what? No, I cannot see into your house right now. So your trackball isn’t working right? I’m showing that you have a mouse and not a trackball. Did you buy the trackball separately? Oh, I see. You do have a mouse, but it’s upside down. No, no, that’s okay, don’t apologize--we get calls like this all the time. Smoke? Coming from where? No, that’s not coming from your computer if it smells like chicken, maybe you’d better check the kitchen? Sure, I’ll wait…” and I dare say that this is no exaggeration compared to many of the thousands of calls that I took. It’s about seeing a picture without being there, and you’d better believe that it IS frustrating for both parties on the phone.
I once took a call from a lady who was cursing, screaming and crying because her modem wasn’t working and she needed to email her husband, who was at sea in the Navy, and the whole thing was horrible because he’d contracted some skin-eating disease that he’d passed onto her after returning from the Gulf War. Oh, yeah. Typical day in Gateway Country. I just happened to have a manager listening in on that one (“jacked in” we called it) and I remember the look on his face as he listened, like he was trying to decipher some ancient coded language. We got her fixed in less than five minutes. “Hooray,” she said.
And then there was the elderly lady who couldn’t see well. She said her CD-ROM drive was “whirring.” I asked her to put the phone next to it. Indeed it did whir—it sounded like two metal wasps fighting with each other. Turns out she had two CDs in the drive. That doesn’t work. We took one out. “Hooray,” I said.
Where computers are going and why Gateway will be there
Hardware is getting cheap. Everybody and their grandmother is offering something free if you sign up for a service. It comes down to service. Gateway owns this field in PCs. You cannot beat Gateway for quality of support and generous warranty/replacement policies. Are you going to hear a horror story once in a while? Of course. You’re dealing with the dynamics of electronics and people. Neither is predictable, but Gateway has a track record of relieving the unpredictability with strong support and customized attention. The equipment in their systems is by and large the same equipment used in any other major manufacturer’s system, and likely less proprietary.
If I had to put a percentage on the types of calls I took, I’d put it something like this:
85%: educating user on hardware/software that is actually covered well in the provided manuals
10%: solving software compatibility issue by reinstalling a program or directing the user to a web site to update a driver
3%: reworking an issue not solved by a previous technician
1%: problem with the quality of a specific piece of hardware of software
1%: weather, phone/electric line conditions, or other environmental issues causing PC problems
Something like that, anyway. And keep in mind that tutorials are not free. And they shouldn’t be. A company can’t put paid technicians on the phone and have them chat with you about the best way to make a graphic ready for the web; they’d go out of business quickly. Technical Support is just that: Technical Support, not Learning How to Compute or Getting What You Want From Your Programs. When you find a company that offer’s free tutorials, please let me know.
I’ll tell you this, in closing: Gateway teaches employees to care for customers (above and beyond the natural concern for somebody who needs computer problems fixed). You may, I’ve heard rumored, run into an “outsourcer” for technical support here and again depending on call volume. Don’t be afraid to ask if that is the case. You can’t go wrong with Gateway because this much I know from personal experience on the inside; they will get you what you need as fast as they can if you ever have any problems, and that’s saying a lot more than the other leading manufacturers.
There’s my little epinion, and this one you can take to the bank.
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Epinions.com ID:
prapresident
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Location: VA, USA
Reviews written: 139
Trusted by: 22 members
About Me:
Fight the power!
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