Imagine taking your car to a dealership for service, then finding out that no one at the dealership actually does work on cars. Instead, they call up someone in another country who does the work, while the guys you thought were working on your car sit back and watch. Crazy right?
The sad thing is that this model has been adopted by many of the big-box stores for computer repair (we won’t mention them by name, because we wouldn’t want to call out Staples and Best Buy on their practices (wait… whoops…))
The big-box stores are hiring more and more computer sales people, but not many actual computer technicians as they outsource a lot of the work to online service providers who access the computer remotely and do the work from customer service centers, often located outside of the US. Why you ask? Actual technicians are expensive, and it is difficult to fully certify and train actual technicians in a setting like retail stores. They would much rather their sales staff to be selling things on the floor, not working on computers behind the counter. This is why they focus on training tactics like selling bundles, how to overcome customer objections to price and how to sell beyond customers means by pushing credit cards. What they should be training them in is how to gauge a customer’s needs or how to actually fix a broken PC. By outsourcing the actual PC work, big-box companies can focus on training employees more in how to sell a product, then what the product or service actually does. This means there is a chance that when you bring your computer into a store like that, you are entrusting your data and your hardware to someone who you will never meet, nor interact with. In many cases, the work that is actually performed in big-box stores is done by people who passed a multiple-choice quiz, some of which have no computer repair experience at all.
Small computer repair businesses provide an actual human that you can directly interact with. Want to speak to the person who cleaned out the dust out of your computer? You can meet them. At Northampton Computer Repair, we do NOT farm out our work overseas, nor does the work get done by anyone other than our highly qualified, in-house technicians. With our company, chances are the person who you first talked to about your problem on the phone or in the store is the person who took your computer in AND did the service. That is one of the many perks of working with a small company like ours. Give us a call for your next computer problem and check us out.
