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My Acer Canada Customer Service Nightmare

I have been repairing and selling computers to my clients over the last four years. Recently I decided to start selling Acer PC’s because of the seemingly quality and price of their desktops. I have purchased well over twenty desktops in the last year and haven’t had too much of a problem. So this post isn’t about my frustration with their equipment. Electronic equipment breaks, I get that. This is more about my frustration with how a large company such as Acer deals with their customers and makes up for the mistakes that they have made.

I bought my Acer Aspire AM5700 on January 11, 2010. I bought it for a man who helps do the bookkeeping for our church. He had purchased a copy of Windows 7 for it, so we upgraded the system. For the first few days, everything was working like a charm. Exactly how fast I would have expected the system to work. Then he called me to tell me it was shutting down at random times. So I went over and played with it for an hour, and sure enough it was getting all sorts of blue screens and shutting down intermittently. Seeing as this was the first Acer I had any problems with I hadn’t gone through the support process. So I looked it up online, and it only took me a few minutes before I typed out all the information they needed. I shipped them the computer for the first time on Feb 25, 2011. It cost me $25 for shipping costs. Which I realize this is well over a month of time between buying it and purchasing it, so you can tell that it was about a month of me trying to convince the customer that he must have been doing something wrong before I realized it wasn’t him. I tried swapping out the different pieces of ram, reinstalling Windows 7, going back to Windows Vista and was getting the same problems over and over again.

So when they sent me the computer back about two weeks after, you can imagine my surprise when they only replaced the Ram and said it was fixed. Sure enough, I give it back to the customer and he reports back to me with all the same problems only a few days later. So I ship it back to Acer again on April 26, they ship it back to me replacing a few other parts (I forget what they were this time). It costs me $25 more in shipping. By this time, my customer was beyond frustrated, so I just ended up buying him another computer. I went HP that time. So now I am stuck with this dud of a computer. I played around with the computer for a few days when I got it back and it had all the same problems. Just randomly shutting down at different times, nothing really consistent, just not working. So on May 21, 2010, I quickly packaged it back up, and called them this time and asked them if there was anything they could do. Could they just give me a refund? At the very least, could they give me a replacement instead of trying to fix something that they obviously have no idea what is going on?

They escalated me to their level two technicians, were an extremely helpful man reassured me that they were taking it seriously and they even offered to pay for my shipping to have it brought in. So Purloator showed up to pick up the machine, and it didn’t cost me anything. They replaced the hard drive this time and a week later I got the machine back, I played with it for a few days and then resold it to another client. Imagine my disappointment when I get a call back a week later saying they were having the exact same problems as my first customer. Randomly shutting off, USB causing it to freeze, blue screening at random times. So I call Acer back. I have to go through their horrible phone support system where I have to read them my serial number and ssid number, I always have to read it a few different times to the digital lady.

Finally I get through, I get escalated to the second level technician person again and get the same lines. They will receive the shipment and ship it back to me. This time they will not pay for shipping. So now I have paid another $25.00 in shipping and it is July 05, 2010. I have been without a working computer and two customers have gone without and I’ve paid an extra $75 in shipping along with the 3-4 hours I’ve spent on the telephone and shipping things back and forth and calling these customers. This is turning into a hefty ordeal. They refuse to send me a new machine and just want me to play this game of sending the machine back and forth with them. We’ve done this four times now. So what do I do? Obviously I’ll never buy an Acer again, so this is costing them more than just a few phone calls since I buy typically around 30 systems a year. But how do I deal with their customer service to get a refund or a full replacement for my system? Anyone out there have any ideas or does someone from Acer want to respond to this post and deal with my problem directly? My service request number is 1-6NIY9I.