Over the last few days, we’ve had a rash of calls from home based customers, which we call “Residential”. One of the first questions that people typically as is: “Do you work with regular people at home?” or something similar.

The answer: YES. Protocol16 works with both business and residential customers. While we cater to the business side of things, with all their servers, workstations and more – we do service residential customers with the same customer service as the business side.

Shopping local these days is a mantra many are repeating over and over. While Protocol16 competes with larger named companies, one of which mere blocks away from the home office (and it’s got a lot of horrid reviews…), there are several national companies that are franchised locally. You may not know it, but several of the other computer repair companies are franchised national companies (read: behind the scenes, there are Corporate bean counters, full marketing departments supporting a few people, etc).

Unfortunately, this mess is about to get just a little larger. It seems that Wal-Mart has decided to dive into the computer repair market to compete with the Geek Squad and other local businesses like Protocol16.

While there a few Wal-Mart’s in Oregon, there are several other competitors that I consistently hear complaints about. With Wal-Mart jumping into the fray, it shows a trend that I have been noticing as well – people are much more thrifty now. Many of my customers are opting to fix older computers rather than buy a new one – and I have no problem with that. Spending a little less money to limp a computer along another year is worth it for a lot of people in Portland, especially those still job hunting.

My main problem with the national competitors is that I’m seeing a huge trend of misinformation or a lot of installs lacking quality. While I don’t want to be specific on the things I’m seeing or who did it, there is a huge difference in quality depending on who works on your computer. It seems that the quality is directly related to two things:

1. Quality of employees. This is actually directly related to the amount of pay someone is getting. Myself, as well as other business owners, have noticed that the quality of applicants takes a nose dive at a specific dollar amount. Any company operating under that dollar amount is opening themselves up to a huge amount of applicants that are under-qualified to work on computers. Oddly, many of the companies operating under that dollar amount charge MORE than Protocol16 does.
2. The size of the company. The amount of employees causes a few problems. The environment is not cohesive to new and brilliant ideas – they get lost in the general chatter of the company. The other issue is that the more employees you have, the more likely you are to get someone that has no clue what happened last time you called or brought in your computer. So, that weird issue you get randomly when you open Office, you have to repeat the whole story to the next guy you talk to. If that next guy wants to get more money in commission off of selling you a computer, he just might ignore what you’re saying and tell you that the flux capacitor at checkpoint charlie is broken (note: neither of those exist in computers) and you need a new computer…

While we’d love for you to become a customer and use Protocol16 as your desktop or computer repair company, do your research and decide if one company in Portland or Beaverton or Hillsboro is the right company for you. I’ve been shopping local more and more, sometimes it’s more expensive, but in the end, it’s our community that I’m helping, not one a thousand miles away.
Justin

It’s no secret that we’re a mobile computer repair company in Portland. We drive all over and see a lot of stuff, but when we’re done with a customer and on the way back to the office, we sometimes stop in to computer shops long the way. While in those shops, we do a few things that includes seeing how our customer service stacks up against the shops as well as check pricing to ensure that we remain competitive and are not overcharging – it’s called Secret Shopping.

Well, I personally got to do a “secret shopper” trip with my wife and we were not impressed. While I waited for 5 minutes to even be acknowledged at one computer shop, all while standing 5 feet in front of the shop owner, I got to listen to a personal conversation – not a professional one. My wife decided to look a display that included a touch screen computer and as well as a Netbook (we like Netbooks here at Protocol16). The display failed to work  and the Netbook was dead as well with Windows errors. Yikes…

When it was finally my turn to talk, I asked how much they were charging for a memory upgrade for a laptop – a service we do at customer locations. Now, I didn’t act like a geek, I honestly acted like a lot of our customers that know just enough to tell someone what they want.

Sadly, the markup the shop was charging was a heck of a lot more than we do and I was told that I needed to let go of my laptop for an entire day so that they could upgrade it. And in the end, they’d only charge me $10 as labor, to perform the upgrade. That’s crazy because we charge much less, even if we were to charge for a 15 minute block of time. The thing is, for this specific service, we don’t charge our time if that’s all you want – just parts since we take your laptop, turn it over and install the hardware and start windows up to make sure everything’s peachy. This type of upgrade literally takes about 3 minutes to do everything, including start Windows all the way up to see if it’s seeing all the memory.

I’ll be honest, when I find out people are taking advantage of others, I get upset. My poor wife had to listen to me complain while we drove all the way back to the office. I understand markup for a boutique computer shop, but not that much for 1 customer, especially after making me wait 5 minutes just to talk.

In this secret shopping experience, I think we’ll keep our rates where they are.
Justin

Portland Metro’s newest “On Site, On Call, Computer and IT Services” company has launched and we’re running a huge special to celebrate!

From now until the end of September, we’re offering $20 off every hour we charge! We offer 24/7 support for the same price so their is no confusion and we don’t charge a same day or dispatch fee, just a 1 hour minimum. We work with hardware (to include Servers, Workstations, Desktops and Laptops), software and even networks. Our technicians are Microsoft Certified so we’ve got you covered from all angles.

Protocol16 may be new in Portland, but that doesn’t mean we’re not experienced. We’ve been registed as a business in Oregon since 2007, we’re fully Insured, Bonded and Licensed so we can help you. We service everything in Portland from Hillsboro to Gresham, Wilsonville to Portland and everything in between.