Best Buy Geek Squad, more like Best Buy “we’ll rip you off” squad
This post was published 3 years 6 months 13 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.Email confession from an ex-Geek Squad employee sheds the reality of working behind the Best Buy quality of service:
As a Geek Squad employee you are expected to meet certain budgets regardless of hours worked and complete x number of units in a day or risk immediate termination. In order to meet the budgets I constantly found that my coworkers, my senior(s), my managers and I regret to admit myself were deceiving customers. Often times I would review tickets and find that units were being checked in that suffered only from minor Windows problems that might take less than 30 minutes to complete however on the ticket they were charged for an OS repair, malware removal and tune-up which at the time cost $118. The units often only had one tracking cookie or some temp files and there was no sign of a malware problem and no need for a tune-up. [...]
I also found that many of my co-workers would intentionally remove the customer’s anti-virus or tell that customer that in order for us to guarantee the work completed our anti-virus had to be installed. In addition to trapping many people with the threats of stolen data and virus infections causing further damage we were instructed by our managers to specifically target older customers, first time computer owners and the lesser educated.
Tsk tsk Best Buy. Threatening to terminate employees if certain quotas are not met? I never believed in that whole Geek Squad service.
personally I like going to best buy and such and pretending to be “uneducated” and see what kinda crap they pull… I’ll ask questions like … “now will this let me check my email?” which is usually a red flag to gaf me with jargon and upsell me stuff… its kinda funny…. or pull the old… “this isn’t a Mac?… whats the difference?”
its great to see people try to plug crap you don’t need…
Unfortunately this is not a new practice. Car mechanics, electricians and plumbers do the same thing.
Remember, Ignorance is Bless, from who use it.
I must say that MOST(if not all) of the employees that work at bestbuy don’t know sh!t about computer software or hardware, guess it’s a good thing that I don’t have to rely on them for my computer needs.
I am an employee at Best Buy, and I will admitt half of the people there don’t know what they are talking about and try to bs their way through anything. Most of them will learn after being put into place by that one customer, that if you don’t know…SAY SO! And yes Geek Squad has a budget but every business needs an expected revenue in order to further grow their business. People who sell ad-on’s that are known not to be needed should not have a job. I just think you can’t judge a company by one of it’s employees or one experience, only in a perfect world.
All I can say is that Geek Squad screwed up my system. They left it in worse condition than they found it . Terrible customer service ethic, too. Not responsive, confused, “left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing” stuff.
Geek Squad is all about posturing, posing like super heroes, surface glam and no substance. Beware the Geek Squad!
About a week ago one of my arrows key on my laptop broke off. Instead of sending it back to Gateway my dad went off and took it to Best Buy’s Geek Squard to be repaired. My mom recieves a phone call that my laptop has been fixed, and that I can pick it up. So my dad drives me up there and we wait about thirty minutes* until one of the apparently trainees goes to the “back” and hands me my laptop. Fine, right?
I go home to find out that it has been reset back to factory resettings. For one, you do not have to reset any computer just to fix one damned key. The whole “WE TRY NOT TO LOSE YOUR DATA” is pretty much a lie. To add, they did not even bother to do a back-up of any kind—unless I wanted to hand them over $44 dollars. (Why would I do that? I am capable of doing that myself.)
One employee being threatened with immediate termination if a budget is not met is either total bullshit or the store’s management staff was that bad. Even if the management was that bad there are still HR hurdles that would need to be cleared to do such a thing. I can tell you right now that your precinct was not taking care of the customer by finding ways to rip them off, charging them for services that didn’t need, just to hit budget. At the many precincts I have worked at, we took care of the customer’s NEEDS not our needs and thats the way it should be. Your store is a bad example that could spoil the whole bunch, but I have to wonder if you were so upset with your work experience why didn’t you call HR thats what they are there for?
hey Im a geek squad agent and I dnt rip people off .. I guess its the store you go to which saddens me .. because there are alot of stores ruining the Image of Best Buy and geeks squad .. so please If you have one bad exprience at a geeksquad or best buy dnt blame the rest of the store and say all of us are bad its just those few stores … In my store everyone does it buy the book corprate sets the budget and the prices sometimes we meet it sometimes we dnt not are biggest worry first thing we take care of is the customer yeah there are people that leave are store very upset but not because of are service but because .. allot of customers that come in the store with something broken want it replaced with something new which sometimes we do give them something new .. but you have to look at it this way if you bought a car and then something broke on it so you brought it to a car dealer ship and demanded a new one would they give it to you ?? most likely not right ?? ..
as far as geek squad agents being stupid .. Ide agree .. there are allot of stores that dnt have fully computer educated but that goes back on select stores not all of them …
Man, I completely agree with every single body on this post.
1) It’s wrong to take this ONE account as a whole for every single one of the millions of stores that Geek Squad reside in.
2) Geek Squad does it’s best most of the time at SOME of the stores. Quick story: I took my laptop into the Geek Squad down in Houston because my fan stopped working and my keyboard got really hot, causing the keys to stick. So they take it, keep it for about four or five days, call me up and say “it’s fixed.” I go to the store, and they explain to me THERE that they had to void my warranty (which was an extra 300$) because they found sticky stuff on the motherboard. I can understand that if there was sticky stuff on the motherboard that, yes, it would be voided. Yet I never had my computer near any liquids whatsoever. Maybe a freak accident? I don’t know. Either way I took the computer home and let my dad know what happened. He suggested I just spray some cheap 1$ Electrical Contact Cleaner on the keyboard to see if it would help at all. I didn’t have to open the laptop at all and my dad doesn’t know anything about computers. I sprayed it, and bam. Fan started blowing, keys started working. I’m never taking my computer to Geek Squad again. And when I bought my new HP from Best Buy this past year, I laughed when I was offered their “Performance Service Plan.” I’ve had to call the manufactuer twice and each time they fixed my computer free of charge. And I can buy a warranty from them at any time.
3) Now that I work for Geek Squad at a Call Center, it’s hard to understand how even being on the inside I can still competently diagnose and FIX client’s issue’s over the PHONE when even our over-the-phone support (Covert Ops as they call it) says they can’t do it. (Like it’s really that freaking hard to instruct a client on how to locate the proper cable to install their secondary hard drive. SECONDARY HARD DRIVE. so there’s no loading of an operating system, it’s just secondary storage.) And the prices are outrageous. But majority of the time if it’s misdiagnosed, the Agent that’s out in the field fixing computers won’t do the right thing because he doesn’t know what to look for in the first place. The customer thinks they’ve explained everything already and let’s the Agent in the door and says “Do with it what you will.” and the Agent does just that. He reads his notes, if even, and says “Okay I’ll run this application, and go home.” Bam. Service performed. But if the service that was performed was to remove viruses when what they needed was more RAM? HA! Their computer is still going to run slow.
It’s all about getting it right the first time. And in-store service, I tell my client’s over the phone how bad in-store service is and to have it done in their home is a slightly bit better. Not by much, because we’ll videotape ya nakie :-D
Get the Creep squad manuals.
Dont trust a sales man wearing polyester. Look for a tech wearing an ESD lab coat.
I dont think the software that they use can remove rootkits. Mabe a few.
The geek squad manuals. You can see they use free software like Spybot and Ad-aware. Its stupid to install these programs then uninstall because these programs run portable anyway. Customers get charged for the extra time.
http://consumerist.com/assets/resources/6geeksquadmanuals.zip
I didnt see anywhere in the manual on how to rollback a restore an XP point using a live CD like Knoppix or UBCD registry wizzard. I dont have the system internals CD mabe they cant, I dont know.
I disagree with the looking for bad caps. Im a electronics tech and some fresh new caps that are directly from the vendor have a slight bulge in them. The thing to look for is oil that has been blown or cracks. Every cap has a blow hole or a X in the top.
If its not shorted the only way to know if its bad is to pull the cap out of the circuit and measure it with a cap tester.
I call them the CREEP SQUAD. I think it would look bad to put this work expericence in a resume.
They use free stuff to fix PCs and then sell you thier stuff.
Ya you should have ram with your doing this cause every tech know the more ram better performance.
These consumer computer repair outfits like the geek squad are repulsive really. It would be similar to taking your sick dad to a guy in a dark alley who can perform heart surgery because he saw it done on discovery channel once.
It’s not going to cost you A LOT for an EDUCATED individual to work on even your home computer. There are lots of starving IT professionals who would never swallow their pride to work at a Best Buy charging people 40$ to add ram to a pc :)
I get sick of coming in behind these guys dealing with mad people who just got raped by some kid with no knowledge of what he is doing. They tried to outsource the “problem cases” to us at one point, but we didn’t really go for it. Why deal with a mad customer and take half the money, to clean up someones mess.
If they tried to get these people in the business sector, their ignorance would bring national media attention. It’s because its residential people they are screwing over, that alot of it is going unnoticed.
I am a former Geek Squad Agent and the information about someone being fired for not meeting budget expectations is BS. I would guess most stores strongly encourage you to meet your budget and get very disappointed when you do not. The store I worked in in Iowa was very well staffed. I would say only one or two of the members did not know what they were doing and they were given the easy tasks. As for the person who needed a key on a keyboard replaced. That is something that can not be done in store and I’m sure they were warned that if their machine was sent to Gateway, Gateway will reinstall windows. That is what Gateway does, not GeekSquad. For most things, Geek Squad is a middle man for all the different service centers for all the products Best Buy sells. It gives you someplace local to take things you broke because you are too stupid to operate them and they will handle all the shipping and talking to the service centers for you. As for virus removal the best bet is always just reinstall windows or switch to Ubuntu. And finally of course they are going to sell you stuff you don’t need they are big retail they didn’t get big by only selling you things you need that is not profitable.
it really depends on the store that you go to. I work for GS at one store and we take care of our customers as much as possible and only recommend what it truly needed. Even on the new pc’s we tell them that if they dont want the virus and spyware protection from us to make sure it still ends up on there. Best Buy is a non-commission store. If the customer takes my advice they will have less to worry about and will be protected. If they don’t want to, I still make the same and go home at the same time of day! I let every customer know that we are a non-commission store and will advise them of whats best for them. Even the laptops that are out of warranty that we would have to send to service, we recommend a few local shops that can do it quicker and a few bucks cheaper because there is no shipping. Main goal there is to get the customer taken care of. I also tell them if they still want me to send it out I will happily do it.
Unfortunately though, not every store works this way. I had a bad experience at another GS store as they were lying thru their teeth and told me what they could not do. I called their bluff and gave him a 5 minute lecture on how we do it at my store for customer satisfaction. Point still did not get across to him. He made a diagnosis with a piece of equipment that i did not have on me at the time. The piece that was defective was what he supposely checked out.
Finally, spyware and viruses are huge today and do need to be protected. you can simply see the state of your computers “health” by doing free scans after a quick google search. Also, every agent is to run the utility which simply shows the health state anytime a customer brings in a PC. If they dont do it, demand it. It is their job. The report comes up on the screen with a green / yellow / red bar. If the bar is red well, you know you got lots of bad stuff on your pc, if the bar is green then you know that spyware and viruses are not your issue. Most people who have issues have either not kept their pc up to date for this type of protection, or use limewire / torrents and just decide to download anything out there. Keep your protection up to date and keep it safe / legal and you will never have to worry about these things!