Well, surprise surprise, Evesham are still shit.
The keyboard on my Evesham laptop is broken and they won’t honour the on-site warranty. Apparently they don’t have motherboards in stock even though my colleauge had his motherboard replaced in the carpark at work a month or two ago. No, they’re going to collect my laptop and send it to China for repair and I can have it back in 7-10 days.
If you’ve read about my shambolic experience of Evesham before then you may remember that the repair to my laptop last year was going to take 7-10 days and I spent weeks without a laptop while they “repaired” it and lost it and lied to me and then sent me an old laptop that they tried to pass off as a new one (I still have the photographs showing it thick with dust.
My conversation with Eveshambles Technical Support went something like this:
Evesham: They don’t do motherboard replacements on-site.
Me: But they did not long ago for my colleague.
Evesham: Ah yes, they’re out of stock now and Mitac have all the stock.
Me: Not a problem, the engineer will have to drive past the Mitac factory to get to my house.
Evesham: They won’t do that.
There was some boring stuff going over the same old things again and I declined his offer to arrange for a collection. It’s not possible to complain to Eveshambles over the phone so I phoned the press office.
Me: Hello, I’m getting really crap service from Evesham again, you’ve had bad publicity about it last time and I don’t mind giving you some more but I wanted to give you the opportunity to make some effort to put it right.
Evesham: Can I take your name?
Me: Stuart Parr
Evesham: Oh right, you’re that wonko person?
Me: Yes.
Evesham: In that case …
It did look like they were going to make some effort, “think outside the box”, live up to the 5-star rating they got for customer service from PC Pro magazine. But no. They won’t ask Mitac to give them a motherboard, not even as a one-off bearing in mind what they’ve done to me before.
So I have no choice – my laptop is going to be collected, it’s going to be shipped off to a factory in China where it will no doubt languish on a shelf for a few weeks and maybe get repaired, maybe get lost. My hard drive will be formatted even though there is nothing wrong with it and I have no way of backing up an 80gb hard drive.
I will, of course, be keeping an Eveshambles Part 2 diary.
There have been a few occasions in the past when I have considered buying from Evesham. Mainly high end desktops for myself and also as replacements for older machines at work. I was pretty much put off by the last episode you reported and I see that some things don’t change. I consider Evesham to be a middling name in the PC market but I think I would much rather work with a smaller company. Someone who is thirsty for my business and who will go out of their way to provide customer support rather than another retailer that makes life difficult when things go wrong.
I mean, sending your laptop off to China? What are they fucking thinking?
Tell me about it.
I used to work for a Dell repair centre and I could arrange a collection from someone’s house in Croatia, get it back here in one day, repaired the following day and with te customer again the day after. Evesham/Mitac take 7-10 working days.
A team leader from technical support at Eveshambles has just phoned to arrange collection. It’s being picked up on Friday to give me a chance to try and backup some irreplacable data. They want the power supply with it to make sure it’s not the power supply giving it an irregular supply, I wonder if it’ll come back. Oh yes, and I’ve got to find a box and stuff to pack it with.
[…] Eveshambles told me my Evesham laptop was going to China to be repaired and that’s why their engineer couldn’t pick up a new motherboard from the Mitac factory down the road from my house and repair my laptop on-site even though I have one of their worthless on-site warranties? […]
Oh, who cares? You’ve got a complaint? Take it up with their customer-services like a grown-up, don’t whine about on the internet.
Reason why this is all happening is because Evesham are on the verge of dying, they treat their own staff like shit, so customers are not important either.
I have to agree, why would they care about customers when all they are interested in is a take over?
Allie, if your not happy reading this then you can always surf off somewhere else, we are here to answer the questions that people want answers to.
Rumour is that the staff will get their final wage on the wednesday & then that could be the end of it, apparently the staff are in just as much darkness over the future of their jobs as I was last nite when I turned my bedroom light off.
Sign on.. sign on 😀
Is it true that some of these customer care girls are good looking, I heard a few of them have got great knockers 🙂
I use to date one of them, but she handed in her notice when she started to see the real evesham.
If you used to work for dell and they are so good why didnt you buy it from dell. Seems like a silly thing to do really.
I got the laptop through the home pc scheme thing that Gordon the Goblin King has pulled the plug on that Eveshambles reckon is causing their downfall.
Dear anonymous contributor(s), please feel free to use the contact form if there’s anything you want to tell me.
[…] I phoned Evesham yesterday to find out the progress of the repair on my Evesham laptop. “It’s repaired but it’s not been shipped yet”. Brilliant, it’s round the corner, I’ll go and fetch it. “I don’t think you can do that sir” … […]
fair play wonko cock, you really are single minded.
how can expecting you to back up your data be a stupid request.
the laptop will not go to china.
do you really think mitac uk would let you pick up a motherboard from there factory because you didn’t read the warranty terms and conditions?
please understand that proceedures all be it dull and tiresum are there normally at the request of watchdog people, derived from complaining customers like yourself.
i do hope you get your laptop back ok. there are many people that work damm hard at evesham, everyday going that little bit extra.
Dell yes are massive, sometimes an advantage,sometimes not, on the whole warranty wise a disadvantage. business wise their service over the last 12 years has provided evesham with a USP, long may it continue!
if you really want to complain, please try and be proactive, it gets you knowhere when you are acting like a know all. if you need something sorted be nice not blurt it on the net INCORRECTLY and vague picking the bits you remember.
after listing to your converstions to evesham i’m amazed we did anything for you at all..
I used to be relaxed and carefree. Then my Evesham laptop broke. In one week the left hand hinge seized up and ripped through the case of the screen and then it refused to boot up – complaining about memory dump errors caused (I think) by a hardware, rather than software, fault. I’ve got a ‘platinum’ (!!!) waranty. I know they are now in administration. If you were me, would you send it back? Or will I never see it again?
And for the inevitable replacement I will have to buy – what vendors do you now recommend?
Dear Angry & Frustrated,
I know exactly where you’re coming from and I understand your anger and frustration. Mine developed a keyboard fault which I got repaired under warranty (although not on-site of course, the on-site warranty doesn’t seem to cover on-site repairs). A couple of weeks later my colleague’s laptop developed the same fault – he sent his back 10 days ago and this morning they told him it still hasn’t gone for repair (I will blog this shortly and link to it). Another colleague’s laptop has also developed the same fault a few days ago and he doesn’t dare send it back.
Would I recommend sending it back? If you’ve got proof of collection then you’re fairly well covered. The laptop will go back into the care of Geemore which is the company that the director of Evesham set up to take over Evesham’s business while he was putting Evesham into administration (all above board, I’m sure). At the end of the day, you have a laptop that doesn’t work at the moment and if you send it away and don’t get it back you still don’t have a working laptop but what you do have is a receipt to show that Geemore has your property and if they don’t send it back to you then you can sue them for it.
As for who I would recommend … I don’t like recommending companies as a rule because if it goes tits up I will end up getting grief off anyone who took my advice. That said, I love a good argument and I would have to recommend Dell purely on the basis of their after-sales support which I know from first hand (having worked for a Dell Repair Centre) is very good. Assuming nothing goes wrong, they will collect a laptop from anywhere in Europe, repair it and have it back to the customer within a maximum of 4 days. In the UK and some EU countries it is 3 days from your call to the courier delivering it back to you. The laptops are reasonably priced, the company is never realistically going to run out of cash (famous last words) and they are at least as reliable as any other large manufacturer. I have had a Medion desktop in the past and whilst it was technically a decent machine the after-sales support was a bit naff (I also worked for a Medion Repair Centre).
[…] Remember how the keyboard on my Evesham laptop broke a few weeks ago? Not long after, my colleague’s Evesham laptop developed the same fault. Geemore, the company that Evesham’s sole remaining director set up to take over the Evesham business (but not the debts), collected the laptop 10 days ago with the standard quoted repair time of 5-10 working days. […]
Here’s the latest episode in the Eveshambles Saga … http://www.wonkosworld.co.uk/wordpress/2007/09/03/the-eveshambles-saga-continues/
Update – I decided against sending my laptop back to the netherworld of Evesham’s return policy and instead made an attempt to fix it myself (normally a mistake, but this time I felt it was less risky…) Well, after a lot of swearing I removed the hard disk, bunged it into a drive enclosure and backed the whole thing up. Then stuck it back in the laptop, did a PC Angel reformat and clean reinstall of Windows, bunged in an extra 1 Gb of Ram and took my pliars and some superglue to the hinge.
It’s like I’ve got a new notebook. It’s faster, it’s more reliable (well it was after I removed Bullguard) and the screen now opens and closes (albeit with a creak).
So I’ve ruined the warranty…. like I’m worried about that in the circumstances!
Forget Evesham and cut your losses – it worked for me… Life’s too short to give a damn sometimes.
But that company really pi*****s me off. (sorry, broke my own rule).