Apple and Razer score top spots in tech support test, while MSI comes in last

[onetheycallEric]

Bottom line: A great laptop is punctuated by great customer support, and Laptop Mag's recent test shows how companies size up after they sell you a laptop. Apple scores first place, with Razer nabbing a close second. MSI, Lenovo, and Huawei round out the bottom three.

In LaptopMag's 2019 Tech Support Showdown, the site goes undercover as an everyday consumer to test the tech support waters from the top laptop vendors. The rankings paint an illuminating picture of which company offers the best support once you've bought into their product lines.

According to the tests, Apple continues its trend at the top by offering accessible and knowledgeable support via live chat, phone, and social media. More surprising is Razer's ascent to the top, taking second place. According to LaptopMag, Razer was at the bottom of the list last year, but has rebounded by offering improved phone support and maintaining an active social media presence. Dell, Samsung and Asus also received decent marks to round up the top 5 manufacturers for laptop tech support.

MSI brings up the rear, and maintained last place. The company's website lacks an intuitive design, its social media accounts are unresponsive, and inaccurate phone support continue to plague it in 2019.

This year was also the debut of Huawei on the charts, as it has been aggressively moving into the laptop market. LaptopMag noted Huawei's tech support was a bit underwhelming, but not bad considering the company is relatively new to the space.

Lead image courtesy Andrey_Popov via Shutterstock

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https://www.techspot.com/news/79807-apple-razer-score-top-spots-tech-support-test.html

 

[TomSEA]

Surprised at MSI's low score. I really like MSI products. And for the last 10 years or so, that's been my go-to brand for MOBO's and GPU's. Never had a problem with any of my purchases, and have gone to the MSI support forums on a handful of times to check on tweaking or BIOS topics. Always found what I needed right away.

 

[kevbev89]

Surprised at MSI's low score. I really like MSI products. And for the last 10 years or so, that's been my go-to brand for MOBO's and GPU's. Never had a problem with any of my purchases, and have gone to the MSI support forums on a handful of times to check on tweaking or BIOS topics. Always found what I needed right away.

I'm not terribly surprised by the customer service part. Taiwanese computer brands have always been pretty notorious in terms of customer support from my experience. What I am delightfully happy about is that MSI moved up from a tier 2 choice to rub shoulders with the big boys now... 10-15 years ago MSI was always a second thought. Being a Asus fan, it is great to see that others are really making their presence known. I hope MSI, Aorus (Gigabyte) continue to bring innovation and sleek, cool designs to the market.

 

[VitalyT]

Thinking of MSI...

 

[shm0wie]

If you make a good product you wouldn't need to support it. Razer is at the top because their products are **** and overpriced.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

This is just laptops, right? What if other products are handled better? How would we know?

 

[brucek]

It's good to see some attention focused on this, although the "support" I care about is less about answering random technical questions, and much more on fixing hardware problems quickly.

Laptop reviews drill down in detail on minute hardware differences, sometimes even providing bar charts that crown one model a winner over a fractional frame per second.

To me the vastly more important difference is how likely is it I will encounter a hardware defect, and if I do, how quickly and and at what cost can I get back up and running. As far as I know, the answer to the first one is "well above zero" for every manufacturer, although I don't know how much it varies from there. As to the second, the answers for many can again be very disappointing, with turn-around times measured in weeks vs. days.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

Not surprised Lenovo's a dud, surprised HP is on a lower score. Will never ever touch their garbage hardware.

 

[Axiarus]

This is just laptops, right? What if other products are handled better? How would we know?

This is what I was thinking. The best customer service I have ever had was from Corsair, but they don't sell laptops.

 

[FPSChris]

Never had or felt there was a problem with MSI's site or support, everything is right there and easy to find.
I've had an MSI laptop for nearly 3 years now, had to contact support once as I couldn't get raid running, 15 mins later and I was back in action with all of the iops.
HP and dell on the other hand... two of the worst companies I've ever had to deal with.
The HP website is an absolute shitshow.
Dell are far better on the business support side, never had to deal with either (thankfully) as a personal customer.

 

[Dosahka]

I'm surprised about Razer's 2nd place, all I can hear is that they have bad support (and my first hand experience just confirmed it for me to sell my Razer laptop instead of trying to repair it) and repair policies, examine machine can take up to months and 40-50 emails to get it done or if your laptop's warranty is about to expire they wait until expired and then telling you that sorry you no longer have it and pay for the repair.

 

[GamerNerves]

Apple at first is no surprise since you expect no other than troublefree support for their prices, but I too find it surprising that Razer is there up high. Their products are inferior quality, but I guess they handle warranty and other stuff well. MSI support is only bad because it's hard to reach. On the website you have to fill all sort of information before sending a simple question. MSI responds in a timely manner though, but if you have something very urgent about your device like motherboard on fire, then you expect 24/7 chat suppot to be available.

These companies are so big they should really invest in good service. There are regional barries of course, like with Gigabyte and most Asian manufacturers, so they often answer in rather simplistic English to customers outside of Asia, while companies like Sony offer various languages. Support and reliability after buying the product has become all the time more important to me, since PC electronics tend to be faulty quite often. They don't break easily, but defective products from the get go are regular. I don't mind paying a slightly higher price if I can trust my issue will be handled. MSI is probably aiming to be like Asus, that they will price their products slightly higher, but that is fine by me if peace of mind is ensured. My current MSI B350M Mortar has been a decent experience and I consider buying MSI products in the future as well.