My Horrible Customer Service Experience With Lenovo

Hi Guys,

Here is my horrible Lenovo customer service experience. Case still has not closed yet. Avoid Lenovo like the plague. This is the message I posted on Lenovo Community:

Dear Lenovo Community & Administrators,

Over the last two months, I have had THE worst customer service experience of my life. My story will tell you why you should think not twice, but three times before purchasing a Lenovo product:

On 1/14/14, I have purchased a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, loved the laptop. However the case had a manufacturing defect (it was not intact and hinges made a clicking sound) so I have decided to replace it with a new one. I called the customer support, and they connected me to ThinkPad repair service. I told them I was not looking for a repair, since the laptop is 2 days old, and after some telephone trafficking for about two hours, I managed to set up a replacement. My replacement arrived 7 days after I returned the defected laptop. Unfortunately, this one also was defective (adaptive keyboard had white stripes and bubbles on it, did not work properly) so I decided that this production line was not good and I should return this laptop for a full refund. I contacted the sales team again, after hours spent on hold, I was able to set up a return. I was told that since this laptop was a replacement, It would take 10-15 days to refund it. I sent the laptop back to lenovo via UPS, with the label that they provided me and it arrived to Lenovo on 2/04/14, and this was confirmed by them. Today is 2/25/14, 21 days have passed but no refund, not even a single call or an email to keep me updated. I have contacted several Lenovo representatives after the 15 days period of time and each one gave me different and vague answers. One of them told me that I will be able to see the money in my account in a week, and another one told me 10 days. Today I called Lenovo once again, and spoke with a very helpful representative named Brianna. She explained me the situation and told me that although they received the laptop on the 4th of February, it was processed on the 18th, and it was A WRONG PROCESS! Because a lousy employee at Lenovo set up the information incorrectly. So she started the process over again, and told me to wait until March 11th, which is still not a set date for the refund. I am furious, and If any Lenovo employee is reading this, I WILL file a lawsuit If I do not receive my refund until March 11th.
I am a college student and I need that money to purchase another laptop, which is crucially important for my school work. You really should hire more capable staff, at least capable of doing basic customer service. And maybe after then, you can realize why Apple dominates the sector with relatively higher price range. I have been using Apple products my entire life and never had a fraction of a customer service issue. Again, If anyone in charge is reading this, I WILL file a lawsuit, If I do not get my money back until March 11th.
As I mentioned before, think twice before purchasing from Lenovo. They sure provide an excellent and rapid customer service when it comes to taking your money

Original Order Number: 4243442736
Replacement Order Number: 4220484755

Regards,
Ediz Aydogdu

NY - USA

 

shame on lenovo - bet they aren't as bad as dell though.

 

1. Sympathetic guy: "Sorry to hear about your ordeal with Lenovo. Hope you will get your money back by mid-March."

2. Guy trying hard to be wise: "Ah, it's just a laptop. Why get so upset? You're only one in a few million customers worldwide."

 

Filing the lawsuit costs money. Better contact consumer rights or whatever you have locally.

 

Not for nothing...(and I'm NOT a Lenovo employee BTW)

After the experience that you've gone through, what makes you think that Lenovo cares whether you file a lawsuit or not?

Good luck.

 

As far as customer service issues, this doesn't seem that bad to me. I once had Asus deny that a fried motherboard was defective and was so difficult to deal with that I eventually gave up on my warranty. Lawsuit sounds good to me since I know a lot of defense lawyers who are looking for work. I don't think you'll win however since you're dealing with seller's negligence and you don't really have any damages yet. But, by all means, sue away.:thumbsup:

 

At best they will just pay the lawsuit off, and you will have spent just as much on a lawsuit as you would have paid to replace your laptop.

 

Yeah, I can't really say anything about how far your prospective lawsuit would go, but I myself have had a horrid experience with Lenovo as well. I will never buy anything from them. When I attempted to cancel my order for the ThinkPad Yoga (which was taking over a month, and being a student, I could not wait that long), I had to go through like 3-4 employees to do it. They were all misleading and told me that they stopped the production and one told me that she stopped the shipment (the cancel request never went through and the item ended up getting forcefully charged to my card and shipped to me); none of it happened! I ended up getting the device. Lenovo has a huge log full of my calls and I have many, many emails of misleading representatives. Lenovo is officially the scum of customer service. There is absolutely no consistently with their service to customers and their lack of communication is what's really lacking. And no, Dell is not as bad as them, from my experience. ThinkPad reputation is also trashed as well, unfortunately. ThinkPad Yoga wasn't as great as I thought it would be, and the customer service just made me hate the device even more.

 

I thought Thinkpad service was handled by IBM, not Lenovo...

 

Only in 'Murica, and because it's IBM doesn't mean it can't suck.

 

Well, OP states he's in New York state (or city), which is in 'Murica. Personally, I've yet to have a bad experience with IBM's service, though I've only used it 2-3 times for minor problems.

 

Not only in America. Many parts of EU as well.

Having said that, there was no "repair" here to speak thereof, so this is entirely a Lenovo-related story...

IBM's call center in Atlanta still offers great customer service in my not-so-modest experience.

 

It is still the best reason to own a Thinkpad.:thumbsup:

 

Ya, IBM call center in Atlanta rocks!!! :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

 

You guys in the USA are lucky - here in Europe / Germany we have to deal with the Lenovo Call center in Bratislava, Slovakia, which is horrible because sometimes the people there can´t really speak German (to explain complex technical issues to them on English isn´t easy for many Germans) and the sound quality through phone is also horrible. Only the Onsite-Support is still mostly handled by IBM technicians (which is also not ideal because they often only have experiences with big IBM servers...).

 

Another chime in for IBM call center in Atlanta for me also. Encountered zero problems when I had asked for a replacement DVD-RW drive and (2) keyboards- both overnighted and delivered by the next evening

 

Phone center was hit or miss. Sometimes I was transferred to people who had no idea what was going on. The departments seemed disconnected.

Warranty stuff: I had next-business day on-site service. Took 5 business days to even get a call from the technician.

 

In the US, the Lenovo website is pretty clear about cancellations not being a normal thing they offer (not sure of the policy elsewhere, perhaps it is different). I have heard lots of stories about people having trouble cancelling, I am starting to think Lenovo should either just fix their system so cancellation actually works or enforce their policy that it's not usually possible. When a customer calls and they agree to try to do a cancellation, they create an expectation in the customer that they can do it...then when they fail, the customer says they are 'misleading' and 'scum'. Here's the quote from their US site:

 

I am returning the x240 we recently got due to fact that there is a 1/4" gap between the screen (lid) and base of the computer when you close it. It was quick and easy to put in the request to return the x240. The call took only a couple of minutes and within minutes of the call I got the UPS shipping label sent to me. Of course how long it takes them to credit the CC card is still unknown but so far so good. I am in the US so I worked with someone in Raleigh, NC.

 

have had 3 incidents with the NC group dealing with refunds/returns, all went well and was pretty fast as well, I used a phone to contact them for the 3 times as well, the first time with the chat portal wasn't the best.

 

Are you in the U.S.?

You must be new to this. If the tech doesn't call you on the next business day after the trouble ticket was opened, you call the center back and raise hell. It's really that simple.

In all fairness I've had to resort to that course of action only once over the past decade.

 

Canada, but I think they route me to US support.

Regarding the NBD service, I actually had forgotten about it. Over the weekend (after calling for support, but prior to being contacted) I decided to just return the laptop then. Lenovo said there wasn't a way to tell the tech so I just to let him/her know when they called me.

My last laptop was a Dell Latitude D630 with NBD service... had good experiences with them, but that was several years ago.

 

Yeah, that "warning" that they have on their site is absolute rubbish if the representatives say otherwise on the phone when they build false trust that they're able to make it happen. Oh, and that "building process" for my machine began a good week or two after I ordered. In a nutshell, Lenovo's everything is a big mess. Lack of internal communication, and disorganization -- I feel like I'm dealing with a shabby family owned restaurant. The particular gentleman who helped me over the phone with my issue of my recent order was the only one who had a sense of what was going on and offered me a discount or accessories to keep my order of the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga. However, I did not end up liking the TPY as much as I thought I would for the build quality is terrible and creaky, and for an almost $2000 device + their customer service -- this is a definite return.

EDIT: In this kind of industry, I don't think any company should be putting that kind of warning about cancellations to begin with. People spend a lot of money on their products and Lenovo should be a lot more careful about their process (making some changes to it would be nice) rather than playing the lazy card and expecting the customer to simply be "aware" about the nature of their building process.

 

Lenovo gives buyers fair warning that cancellations are not normal and not always possible. I think that buyers who decide after-the-fact that they want more than Lenovo agreed to contribute to the problem. I do agree, as I stated above, that Lenovo makes things worse by saying on the phone that they will try to do the cancellation and then failing.

 

For every complaint I see on here I see four positive experiences, usually in the same thread.

On the other hand, we hear complaints but think of all the good experiences people have that go unsaid. If things are going well, why write about it?

Might as well go complain about it on Tumblr...