[traumer]

"We felt a little noise and angst from our customers, and we decided to make some changes"

DELL was always a trend-setter...

[tacticalogic]

Dell, you're gettin' some dudes!

[Maceman]

I know someone who just bought a Dell computer. They had a problem with the delivered product, and have had a terrible time getting cutomer service to respond appropriately.

[PeteFromMontana]

"We felt a little noise and angst from our customers"


Like when I called their customer service line, got someone that could barely speak english, asked for a supervisor... IN AMERICA (she thanked me)

[Capriole]

Seems to me that Dell is not a trend-setter in this regard, but has made a mistake and is backtracking. Why I like Gateway: I can go into the store and pick out my machine, and if there's a problem I can bring it back to them to fix instead of shipping it back or having them ship a new part out that I have to figure out how to install. I can talk to the Gateway techs, who are all smart American kids with no language barrier except for calling me "Dude, Ma'am" which is cute. But they're THERE, in my town, not in some damn place 18000 miles away. There's accountability.

[Starwind]

"Our corporate customers have come to expect a certain level of expertise," Cotshott said.

Whereas the rest of us don't?

Dell is creating a huge market of un-served upset customers, which creates a business opportunity for someone organized enough to build an independent support organization.

[mylife]

I had anticipated this, but Dell threw in a twist. They realized that customers were pissed and responded. The twist is that they divided customers into 2 groups, the companys(large profit) and the average joe(low profit).

Dell can go to hell,they couldnt make it clearer that they think the average customer should!

[TroutStalker]

What I posted to a thread yesterday:

I bought a Dell Dimension 8300 ($2500 total) last year and had problems with it right out of the box. After probably forty hours on the phone with India, six components replaced, and a letter from my attorney, they sent me a new machine. Of course, it may be the same with any other brand too.

[unixfox]

I am a Dell Solution Provider, have been since they started the program about a year ago. I've sold a few systems and had very few problems.

However...

I had a monitor go bad and needed a replacement. I went through Dell Hell getting it replaced. I had to speak with a "Systems Engineer" from INDIA about my bad monitor. He asked me how did I know that the monitor was bad, I said, well for one thing it doesn't come on and secondly because I have been doing this for 20 years. After about 2 weeks of going back and forth with these bozos from India I said I wanted to speak with someone in AUSTIN BY GOD TEXAS !! At this point I was more than pissed. I was finally told that in order to get the monitor replaced I would have to become Dell certified. They NEVER said anything about that when they signed me up to become a reseller. Ok...so I get certified after waiting another 2 weeks for the stupid test. I get a monitor about 2 weeks after that. It took almost 8 weeks for this to happen !!

The sad part? I am right here in Austin just a few miles from Dell headquarters where I could have driven over there in less than 15 minutes and picked it up myself !!

[Snuffington]

Gee, I'm shocked. For months all the industry experts have been telling us this offshoring was a one way street. An irreversable trend we'd just have to accept.

Meanwhile, a few of us in the IT industry who actually see this stuff up close and personal have been telling folks this is a fad, and predicting a bounce back. If the quality in phone support wasn't good enough, don't fool yourself into thinking complex engineering is faring better.

The long term role of India and other offshore solutions will be to make up for labor shortages. In quality and productivity American work is still superior.

[MarkL]

My company sells Dells, and while they're quality computers, their warranty leaves something to be desired compared to HP (and the old Compaq). Due to Dell's contractual obligations, we can NOT provide warranty service, except to a few, selected customers, who pay Dell an annual fee for that "privaledge." For anyone else, Dell has to dispatch a service tech with a part. The problem is that they WILL NOT dispatch a tech to diagnose the problem: The customer must work with the phone tech to diagnose the problem, and the field tech does nothing other than swap out the part. If a client needs to have the OS reloaded after swapping in a new hard drive, the field tech isn't allowed to bill the client for his time to do it! It's up to the end user.

One of our clients bought a brand new, low end Dell server (Power Edge 500SC, I think) for a small (4 user) network they have. May I start by praising Dell? When they sell as server and tape drive, they bundle the tape software (Veritas Backup Exec AND Veritas Inteligent Disaster Recovery, IMHO, my favorite tape SW) with the drive!!! Anyway, Windows 2000 Server started complaining that the hard drive was finding bad blocks. I asked them to send me the error messages, and told them they needed to contact Dell, read off the error message to the tech, and that Dell would send someone to replace the hard drive, and that I'd be out to restore the data, although that part would not be free. They were OK with that, but I got a call a short time later, and Dell told them that they needed to run the embedded Dell Diags on the server. They didn't feel comfortable doing that, so they had me come out to run the diags at their cost. As I booted the server, I saw that the drive was even failing the SMART diags at boot, indicating a failure was imminent! That wasn't enough for Dell. I started the quick diag test, which took about a 1/2 hour, and the drive passed, but it only checks the beginning and end of the drive. Since it passed, that wasn't enough for Dell. So I started the "full Diags," which would take about 2 hours. I took off for lunch (the client was too far for me to drive back to the office, so I had to stay on that side of town... Just trying to save them money...) I came back an hour later, and the test was still running. Two hours into the test, the drive finally gave up an error message, and the tech on the phone sounded genuinely suprised that there was something wrong with the computer! He did dispatch a tech to replace the drive, and it was replaced the following morning.

The problem was that the client wound up paying my company for 2 hours of labor ($300) to diagnose a hard drive problem that both the hardware and software agreed was faulty. So, to get a free, replacement 80 GB ATA hard drive, about a $150 or less value, it cost them $300. From that point on, I decided that if a client with a Dell needs a hard drive replaced under warranty, and they're not capable of working with Dell telephone support, that I'm going to send them to Best Buy or some other place to buy a hard drive, and I'll replace it myself when I'm sent out to reload their systems. It's cheaper for them than getting the free, warranty replacement drive!

Mark

[Lunatic Fringe]

We felt a little noise and angst from our customers, and we decided to make some changes

I guess Dell's customer's wanted to speak to someone who could speak ENGLISH!

[MissAmericanPie]

"We felt a little noise and angst from our customers, and we decided to make some changes," said Gary Cotshott, vice president of Dell's services division. "Sometimes, we move a little too far, too fast."

Yeah, I'm one of those noisy customers full of agnst, tired of repeating myself six times to someone that barely speaks english, and certainly doesn't comprehend english, and never gets my problem well enough to route my call.

Get sent to the wrong department, put on hold, get your connection dropped and have to begin again. It's infuriating.

[Agnes Heep]

Some customers have complained they can't understand Indian workers because of their accents ....

I used to patronize the liquor store of an Indian guy, who spoke very good English, but in such a way that I had to make him repeat every sentence, sometimes two or three times.

[Cicero]

To be frank, I've never had any luck with ANY technical support for ANY computer I've ever owned. One company is as bad as another. The reasons are obvious. They shave down the price of the computer, but there's no way you can shave down the cost of a real expert's TIME. So either you wait forever to get through to a real expert who has no time when you finally reach him, or you get quickly put through to a moron.

So, what I quickly discovered is that you have to learn how to fix problems yourself. Educate yourself on the hardware and software, and visit with knowledgeable people on-line. I found have found the CompuServe forums invaluable, although they are not what the were before AOL took over.

[big_Rob]

Naturally, Dell responded to the business users first. They complain. If a work computer doesn't function, lots of prolems occur, and the guy using the PC catches it. Most (anecdotal data) personal users just live with minor problems, and use the inferior support from overseas. They don't like it, they complain to their friends, but they seldom move up the support ladder to actually tell someone who matters. If the private consumer doesn't make a loud noise, why spend the time or effort to fix their problems. Remember, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you don't make the effort to complain to the right people, don't expect anything to change.

[glorgau]

"We felt a little noise and angst from our customers, and we decided to make some changes"

When finding out that your call is routed to India, one should do what is termed in the industry as a "hostile hangup".

[Cacique]

ping