A common refrain we hear from the former and current Geek Squad employees we’ve been talking to is that Geek Squad used to be awesome. Robert Stephens built up an award-winning company with a reputation for being the best in the business. Then he sold it to Best Buy and they turned it to garbage.

One of these former Geek Squad employee shares his thoughts on their data recovery, outsourcing, upsell, and hiring of salesmen over techs policies, inside…

(Photo: bossco)

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Geek Squad is a good company to work for. They have a nice ideology and cult-like attitude. However from my experiences working for GS, I have found that a majority of their Agents are rather ignorant about real tech work. Most of them only know how to run GeekSquad’s MRI CD and Customizer. Hardly any of them even use ESD (electrostatic discharge) equipment. And don’t believe the BS they tell you when they say “Our floor is specially treated for ESD”. That would only matter if you are wearing heel straps, which they don’t. Their prices are far overpriced. In some cased they charge double what their competitors charge. There are some very competent Agents, but most of them are from the pre-BBY buyout.

“Quality – We have an entire quality team whose responsibility is to ensure that our Agents have properly repaired the customers unit.”

Was put into place after NUMEROUS complaints from Precincts and customers from the poor quality.

FACTS

1. Data Recovery is not a big deal. They hook it up to any random desktop, run a recovery program (license costs about 1k a year), and click recover.

2. They outsource some of the repairs via a remote access application (AKA AJU or Agent Johnny Utah). These people are in countries that have no similar privacy laws that are in the US. So in other words, your computer with your saved bank passwords, government contacts, ETC; are being accessed by “Bob” in India, Pakistan, and various other countries around the world.

3. An Agent’s RPT or Revenue Per Transaction is around $250.00. Which means if you are spending less than that, their goal is to get you to spend more.

4. Geek Squad hires people based on their Salesmen and Customer Service skills before they hire on their Technical Prowess. They would rather Train a salesman to be a tech than train a tech to be a salesman.

Based on what’s been said here and previously, you might be better off taking your computer elsewhere for repairs. Unless you like the idea of a guy who used to work at Taco Bell fondling your laptop. Now we’re sure there’s some competent and even talented and enthusiastic folks doing repairs for Geek Squad, but there’s enough of them that aren’t to raise concerns for consumers. — BEN POPKEN

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