[ascherjim]

A week or so ago I bought my wife a Nook Color (attempting to wean her off her beloved IPaq) and it worked fine for a day and she loved it. After a day however it wouldn't any longer connect to her PC. She had to call B&N Tech Service and talk with technicians several times before the preliminary diagnosis that it was only(!) a cable problem began to look more serious. The last technician with whom she spoke told her to take it in to the nearest local B&N store, which fortunately was quite near. There, a very knowledgeable clerk got on the phone herself to tech service and, after several back and forth phone calls between them, my wife was issued a new Nook Color on the spot, which is so far working perfectly. (Although she did have to call tech service again when it seemingly wasn't connecting to the internet. However, the technician helped resolve the problem by identifying my wife's inadvertent mis-entering of our WEP code.)

In all of the above, we found that the personalized support we received from actual live people at B&N (by phone to tech support and in-store) was superb, and we are much impressed and gratified.

However, when we have concurrently had to deal with B&N Customer Service by email (on matters of ordering the Nook Color and subsequent purchasing of Nook Books) our experience has been just the opposite. Uninformed and unresponsive.

So, the lesson we believe we have learned is that it is important when dealing with B&N to resolve a problem, it is far better to communicate with a real identifiable person, with a name. But isn't this usually the case in general?