Circuit City The Simple truth about Circuit City Extended Warranties Nationwide Illinois

Circuit City extended warranties (for computers and preipherals) is outsourced to a company known as GE-Assurant. It used to be GE-Zurich but for various reasons Zurich sold its interest to Assurant. This matters very little to you (the consumer) because the warranty is being serviced by the EXACT SAME PEOPLE as before, with the EXACT SAME POLICIES.

I worked for GEZWM for over a year as a technician. This is what I learned.

1. Circuit City salespeople lie through their teeth to sell the contract. "Everything" is not covered, only electronic failure. Physical breakage of any device is not covered. To be fair, if you drop your Palm Pilot and it breaks, why should that be covered? Unfortunately, it also means that if the crummy little piece of plastic tab that holds the battery cover on your camera breaks, it isn't covered either even though you did nothing wrong. READ THE CONTRACT YOU ARE PAYING FOR!!!

2. Even if a the failure is covered you will be made to jump through every possible hoop before it is fixed. While it is good to do some troubleshooting (if a tech is sent out to fix the wrong thing, nothing is fixed now, is it) this is carried to a ridiculous extreme. Despite the efforts of more than a few of us, this never changed. There is a group in charge who believes that the only way to make money is to dispatch as few techs as possible no matter what.

3. If you have a printer problem, you are 95% certain to have to replace the ink cartridges. There are some exceptions but not many.

4. Most parts sent out are refurbished. This includes hard drives, motherboards, monitors, printers, scanners, cameras, PDA's and more. Again, a few exceptions but that's because nobody refurbishes modems. Also you WILL NOT get the same make/model you had originally unless you are lucky. And what you get may look beat up. There are certain specifications that are considered and that's it. Don't like it? Too bad, so sad.

5. The no lemon policy is a joke. Some systems do get replaced but not many. And then only after the customer is put through the ringer. It usually happens only because the part can't be sourced.

6. You can get a refund on your contract, pro-rated based on how much time is left. Just call and ask for the address, it has to be done in writing and will take 6-8 weeks but what did you expect, that they'd make it easy?

7. If you really want results, go to Circuit City and start raising a ruckus to the manager.

8. Laptops are serviced only at a depot. I'm sure many repairs go fine but I heard too many bad stories to EVER trust my laptop to the 3 fingered monkies that must have been hired to fix them. Cracked screens, stuff NOT fixed, laptops getting damaged at the depot (not in shipping, AT THE DEPOT) and getting sent back damaged, the wrong laptop being sent back, etc and so on. Of course if the screen on your laptop dies it will cost $$$$ to fix so make your choice.

9. Don't trust the tech to call you back. They didn't reward us for call backs, only for inbound calls. As a result, I used to try and call when I knew the people wouldn't be home. There was no way I wanted to deal with all the calls in my queue if didn't have to. And I was one of the nicer guys.

10. Be prepared to lose all your data. An HDR (Hard Drive Restore) is standard procedure for lots of troubleshooting and that means erasing the hard drive. If all goes well, it will take about 90 minutes. Have fun. They will not help you save the data, that's your problem. (you should be backing it up anyway though)

11. The only thing that matters is the hardware failure guidelines. And it is almost impossible for anything failing intermittantly to meet them. Several times a week I had to deny service to stuff I KNEW was bad because it didn't meet the guidelines. Sorry but I needed the job.

12. The company doesn't pay squat, so they don't get many good techs. There are exceptions of course but they bail ASAP. Yes, I was considered a good tech. Unfortunatly I got caught up in the idea that things could be changed and wasted a good 6 months tryng.

To everyone left at the company I say this, they closed Hoffman Estates, Assurant outsources more IT work to India than anbody but Dell, how much longer do you think the Dallas center will be there? A year? Maybe? The only reason Assurant bought in was for the national service provider contracts, those are first-rate (from Assurant's stand point). Your jobs are going oversees

Scott
Hoffman Estates, Illinois
U.S.A.

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