Dell Customer Support Strikes Again

from the never-buy-Dell dept

It's too bad that Peter Delevett from the San Jose Mercury News doesn't know me. If he had only asked me my opinion of Dell laptops and their "customer support" I would have told him to run far far away. Instead, he listened to others, and went ahead and bought a Dell laptop. Now he's dealing with a customer service nightmare that I know so well. It's nice to see Dell hasn't improved any in the year and a half since I last dealt with them.
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  1. identicon
    xdroop, 8 Jan 2002 @ 12:30pm

    Don't get it.

    So he submitted an order and is upset that when he called back three days later to change the order, Dell can't fall over backwards to accomodate him?

    Did I get that right?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. icon
    Mike (profile), 8 Jan 2002 @ 12:35pm

    Re: Don't get it.

    No. That wasn't the problem. In fact, as you can see, once they told him they couldn't change the order, he was fine.

    The problem was that he simply could not get a person on the phone who would tell him that. They kept passing him around and telling him different things. The one person they told him he had to talk to had a voicemail box that was full.

    That's bad service.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    BrentX, 9 Jan 2002 @ 7:47am

    Re: Don't get it.

    I am pretty hard to make happy and even harder to force a comment, you have hit a topic I disagree with. While I am not a supporter of Dell my satisfaction with my Inspiron 5000 notebook has caused me to buy a desktop P4$ and a notebook for my mother.

    My Inspiron has been rock solid for 2 years and over a 250,000 travelled miles. Sure it has some bumps and bruises, but it is a great machine. I agree that they run their inventory levels so low that they often have back orders, but as far as a solid product, I am happy with them. YMMV.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. icon
    Mike (profile), 9 Jan 2002 @ 8:53am

    Re: Don't get it.

    I'm sure not everybody had a horrible experience. For seven years (1993-2000) I was a very happy Dell customer, and between me and my family we bought 7 Dell machines over that time frame. Any time I had a service problem they responded very quickly and courteously (best example: in 1994 a monitor I had started fading to yellow for no clear reason. I called Dell at 7:30pm on a Wed night. At 4:30 in the afternoon the next day I had a new monitor waiting at my door).

    But, when I bought my laptop in 2000, and 3 months later the screen died and they refused to fix it... that was it. If it had just been one person who was bad at customer service it wouldn't have been a problem, but I dealt with about 10 different people, all of whom somehow contradicted someone else, or said something that was outright wrong. Most of them tried to pass me off to someone else without helping me.

    The one guy who told me I was like a little child asking for a piece of candy was the one who sealed the fact that I would never purchase from Dell again.

    So, people have every right to go out and buy a Dell laptop. I'm sure some of them will be happy. But, if they ask me about it, I share the complete (very long) story about why I won't just so they know that such an experience is a possibility.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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