HP admits: We deceived consumers

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blog Remember how the national competition regulator took HP to court back in October last year for allegedly breaking Australian consumer law by making misleading representations to customers regarding their warranty rights? Well, as it turns out, the ACCC was right. As reported by ZDNet this morning (we recommend you click here for the full article), HP has admitted that the ACCC was right on the fundamental issue. A pretty damning few paragraphs:

“HP admitted that help-desk representatives who made misleading claims were actually following scripts and guidelines provided by the vendor internally … HP’s legal representative agreed that it did indeed contravene Australian consumer laws”

Wow. So HP was actively avoiding meeting its Australian obligations in the area of warranties? That’s pretty incredible. I wouldn’t say it’s actually evil on a significant scale, but it’s definitely not playing fair with consumers, either. There’s a lot more to the story, of course — and still under debate is whether HP’s actions actually cost anyone any money. But on the face of it and especially for the sake of our less-technically savvy friends and family, we’d have to say we’re very glad the ACCC followed this one up. We also have to grudgingly allocate credit to HP for ‘fessing up — we can think of many corporations who would have probably fought this one tooth and nail rather than admitting they did anything wrong. Let’s hope HP takes a more careful approach to its customer obligations in future.

Image credit: HP

6 COMMENTS

  1. Of course without some sort of penalty there is no incentive not to do it again, or to prevent others doing it. Waiting with bated breath……

  2. Calling the consumer support was an absolute nightmare, hours of my life I will never get back just to report a faulty driver installer for a printer.

    For enterprise equipment it was a different story (with the dedicated number we had at least) those guys were generally very good, getting it sorted fast.

  3. Yes, there seems to be a huge difference between what equipment and support is provided direct to customers and what is provided to organisations. I have had dodgy equipment and bad service as a consumer of HP so I personally won’t buy computer equipment from them again. However, the organisation I work for uses HP and the equipment is top quality and service is exceptional. This might be the same deal with other companies as well.

  4. I’ve used HP support for my laptop before. (Webcam and integrated microphone array died) they were great. I told them: it doesn’t work, they of course asked me to re install drivers, where I explained I was an IT contractor and I had reinstalled everything, and had diagnosed it as a hardware fault.
    There was a few options I think I had to decline despite this but nothing huge.

    They offered to send a courier to pick it up (should have done this) but I said I’d drop it off as I needed it for work that week (big mistake).

    I never dropped it off, and totally wasted their time, but it was a generally positive experience.

    Of course, I did that thing no one does, and used the text-support line. I had also found all my serial numbers before hand and copy pasted them in before I was even asked for them. Sped everything up.
    They can’t misunderstand you, but they do still have a script of some kind.

    This was approx 12 months ago.

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