We hope that Dell will soon react to his plea for a better service. Cheap, yes perhaps – but not a solution that I would recommend to anyone.

The first one ran for 4.5 years, with few problems. I had to replace a modem, and customer service ran me around so badly–and inaccurately–I swore I’d never get another Dell. (I wrote a long and detailed letter to their customer service at that time, and have yet to see even a form letter in reply.)

But then this one started to go, and I checked the website, I got suckered in by the offer of a free flatscreen monitor. The system came pretty fast, but with a DVD drive I hadn’t ordered, so I had no writing capability. I called and screamed, and they sent me the right drive, which I had to install myself.

Still I could not make the XP file transfer wizard work…a very basic start-up gizmo. When I called and screamed some more, the techie said that IF I ASKED FOR IT, he could send the XP program disc (which they do *not* send with your computer). He said that might do the trick.

At the word “might,” I lost it, and demanded to be transferred to someone who could give me a return authorization. Two days later–right within the 21-day return window–I took the whole unit down to my local UPS store, and shipped it back to them.

Bye bye Dell hell…

After finally connecting with someone obviously in India and who could barely speak English I spent the next two hours trying to explain my PC situation, but to no avail. I decided to give up for the night and try again in the morning. It would be no surprise to anyone who has called Dell support that I once again spent more than 3 hours on hold just waiting for someone to speak with. If one calls to purchase a Dell the wait time is about 10 to 30 seconds. I tested this theory several times.

Rather than go through the whole sorted scenario I can sum it up by saying that I spent a total of 60 hours on the phone and countless hours trying to muddle through 40 pages of Dell Hell E-mail commands before I actually threw my Dell over my third story balcony. I looked before I threw. It was time to cut my losses and get on with life and focused writing. Needless to say I had been working on a borrowed PC during this period. The freedom I felt after throwing my Dell overboard was overwhelming. I can only campare it to what it must be like to be freed from a wrongful imprisonment. I guess it’s, “dude, dump the Dell and feel the freedom”.

You can talk to customer relations and DEMAND a refund. If you are nice, you will get nowhere! Good luck.

What was my most recent purchase? HP Laptop. Tech support OK, final outcomes execllent.

now my son goes to college next week – no laptop that works. Based on what I’ve read, I guess I should just let the $1400 go and buy something else. This whole thing makes me sick that i have a piece of junk that they can’t take back and send me a new one. I WILL NEVER PAY MONEY for DELL EVER EVER AGAIN and I will be spreading the word to everyone and anyone who will listen.

Although I ordered one computer, Dell sent me two. One was supposed to have been sent to a small business in Rhode Island (I live in Michigan). The second was supposed to be my computer; however, it was not built to my specifications. I was dissapointed, but hey, mistakes happen- not a big deal to call and straighten it out……right!

My frustration and disgust with Dell was born out of their ineptitude with admitting they made a mistake and their methods of rectifying the situation.

My experience with calling customer service was absurd. How can they call it customer service!! I was put on hold for an unreasonable amount of time each time I called.

When someone finally answered my call (and yes I called 4 different times regarding this problem) they could hardly speak English! The “speech” that I heard each time seemed scripted, as though they were given a list of things to say when responding to problems. My problem didn’t fit with any of their scripts!

The solution seemed simple enough to me. I could just ship the computer back to them and they could build the computer that I had originally ordered for the price I had been promised. But no, that did not fit with the script!

Their idea of a solution was for me to keep the computer they sent (which was not as powerful nor had the same bells and whistles as the one I had ordered) and they would give me a digital camera. By the way, the computer they sent didn’t have the correct software to use with the camera. They seemed truly surprised that I refused the camera and wanted the computer built my way- not theirs.

Long story short, after many frustrating calls and transfers to supervisors/managers. I sent the computer back and reordered my computer using a different sale offer.

The computer that was erroneously sent to me is another long and sordid tale of unresolved anger and phone calls that I won’t bore you with. But, I ended up having to contact the true owner by telephone myself (at Dell’s request) to let him know I had received his computer and was sending it back to Dell. Oh yes, Dell gave me his number- seems a little unprofessional to me!

Too bad they ticked me off, I have three kids who will be needing their own computers for college in the near future. I can assure you we will not be using Dell for our computer needs!

Dell needs to figure out that outsourceing doesn’t work.

My experience has been that Dell has always promply replaced any components that malfunctioned within the 3-year warranty. However, if you want decent technical service, it is imperitive that you spend the extra $75 or so for the Gold Tech support – that way you are assured of getting a stateside tech support person on the phone within a few minutes who is usually helpful, or at least trys to be.

That being said, any calls to Dell for any other type of customer service issues almost certainly brings you to “Dell hell.” My experience has been that if a Dell rep has to look anything up, they will put you on hold and, while waiting for the rep to return, you’ll almost certainly find yourself disconnected. I guess it is simply easier for the rep to disconnect you than take care of the problem.

What he missed is that you better not piss off a guy from New Jersey!! jersey ain’t Kansas.

I was days away from buying an IBM Thinkpad (which works like a beauty) when Dell had this fantastic how-could-you-refuse-it 3 hour deal to get the best model of the 600M for $750. It was less than half the price- how does a college student crawling under the weight of loans walk away from that? I suppose more importantly, how does the parent of a college student crawling under the weight of loans walk away from that? So Dell it was.

So my brand new 600M shows up at the doorstep and still mourning what could’ve been a brand new Thinkpad, I open it up and think to myself, “Well, it’s still a laptop… it’ll still work, here goes!” Worked pretty well… for about 2 weeks. I was using it in class, put it to sleep, brought it home a few hours later, and what do you know? I get a fatty error screen telling me that some component is missing and Windows cannot load. Just perfect. At that point, I had no choice, so I pull out my Windows XP restoration disk and try to reinstall Windows in a pathetic attempt to save everything that I had spent the last 2 weeks setting up. I ran the disk, Windows booted up, got into My Computer…. andddd BAM. A beautiful screen of BLUE.

Sitting on the verge of tears, we call up Dell, wait for an hour, and finally reach a Customer Service rep. She has us run a bunch of tests on our hardware and what do you know… a big fat red FAIL on my hard drive. Now of course, I’m sitting here wondering myself, why in the world did they not run these tests BEFORE they sent us this cursed laptop?!
The response? “We’re so sorry, we’ll send you a new hard drive and then you can send us back your old one.”
“Well, can we get some compensation? I just lost tons of stuff on this thing that I can’t get back. Unless you would like to type up my massive thesis paper again for me?”
“Yes, we can compensate you $75 dollars of store credit (WOW! That makes it all worth it!) but you’ll have to call another number for that tomorrow morning.”

Well, that’s how the story ends, I guess. Now I’ve got $75 dollars to spend on probably something else that will break down and make me weep and the luxury of sitting and wondering everyday if today is going to be the day that my Dell laptop suddenly breaks down on me again and my world comes to a crashing halt. Everytime it freezes up (and it does often) I get a panic attack b/c I don’t know what to expect. I knew I should’ve gone with the Thinkpad. The funny thing is, I thought that maybe it was just a glitch or a rare case but I was telling my cousin about it (who also bought a Dell laptop) thinking he would be surprised, but apparently the same thing happened to him just a few weeks before. And since then, I’ve heard a handful of similar stories, and that’s even before I started sifting through the blogosphere. So take the caution readers! Don’t buy a Dell laptop or a desktop for that matter (mine just sits there and churns like a lawnmower all day- I don’t even bother touching it anymore). Save yourself the frustration and the headache- it’s not worth the difference of a few hundred bucks. Dell has long lost its touch.

I have been doing call-center work for many years and, believe me, it’s worse than you think. Customer support operations are inherently unstable. There are many reasons for this but the most important, ironically, is a misguided short-term focus on customer satisfaction. Management ALWAYS falls into this trap eventually–they get evaluated based on month-to-month blips in their customer satisfaction numbers, and they find that the best way to increase the blips is to focus all the organization’s resources on immediate resolution of problems. Longer-term issues like training, hardware and software acquisition, systems management, and documentation get neglected. Eventually, of course, this neglect causes the blips to start going down (generally after six to twelve months). This, in turn causes management to put an even bigger emphasis on short-term statistics, which leads to further decay, and so on. Only when the organization hits absolute rock bottom are serious management processes put into place. This in turn lasts until the next downward blip in the numbers (or the next major cost-cutting effort), when the cycle starts again.

Since Dell is in other respects a very successful company, their support organization is nowhere near hitting bottom. My guess is that the next few years will see lots sound and fury from upper Dell management on the subject of support, with lots of firings and reorgs. The firings and reorgs will serve primarily to alienate and burn out most of the senior people, however. The general trend in customer satisfaction will continue to be down, although with a few temporary upticks.

1/ my first problem with Dell is not quality, it’s the fact that when I buy Dell, a lot of my money goes into supporting W Bush. And I think the invasion of iraq is a total idiocy (fuels terrorism, kill ten of thousands of iraqis, pushes the world into recession through fuel prices … good only to halliburton and other army contractors). And Europe, my country is much more vulnerable to the increase in terrorism the the USA.

2/ from what I have heard Dell has a good reputation here overall. I like to order with them, but maybe just out of habit. However I know there has been a big contract with the “région nord-pas-de-calais” I live in, in wich they were completely screwed up, not on just one computer, but on a very big order.

But after reading piles upon piles of responses. This makes me smile, this just means for people who make money on fixing computers like me.

Theres alot of bussiness!

hehe

I, like you, bought the “Big Kahuna” warranty promising complete care. Well, their definition of “Complete Care” must consist of: waiting on hold, often for more than an hour, finally speaking to someone who doesn’t really speak English, and being asked inane questions like “Have you tried restarting your computer?” or “Is your computer plugged in?”. My favorite was when I called because both my battery and AC adapter had failed and the woman kept asking me to connect to the internet. Well, connecting to the internet would require turning on my computer which would require power, both sources of which are BROKEN.

I recently sent my computer off to the Dell Depot because it was blacking out and rather than the 3-5 business days they promised, I finally received my computer 11 business days later. After about 7 days I checked the status online and it said “Nonfunctional.” Not knowing what the hell that meant I called the toll-free number where I got stuck in an eternal loop, hearing the same menus over and over again.

I would rather use papyrus and a quill pen than buy another Dell computer. Yes they make a cheap computer, but you get what you pay for and often a lot less.

The posts detailing my journey are by Betette at: http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_general&message.id=198312&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

Good luck to us both!

After Scott Rosenberg from Salon rightly takes apart Daniel Gross for posting “The company is justly known for its fantastic customer service” you write “Dell isn’t known for its customer service. Dell is known for being cheap.”

I wonder. Isn’t Dells price leadership just more “boilerplate from an analyst’s report or the company’s own marketing literature.” I’m ot saying they charge a premium but I think Dell actualy got famous (well known in the business lit) for rewarding investors (and their agents) richly.

Dell may have started as a great deal for customers but as soon as Wall Street got involved one thing becomes very clear at listed companies: When crunch time comes customers are fourth (or worse) in the priorities.