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Dell Chastized Over Customer Service
The Register is reporting that Dell recently agreed to give into demands from the UK's Office of Fair Trading and alter the agreements that accompany their hardware. From the article: "The OFT has spent the past few months sparring with Dell over the company's terms and conditions. The two organizations recently agreed to settle their issues with Dell changing contracts and making them "fairer to consumers," the OFT said. The specific changes, however, remain secret as neither the OFT nor Dell will reveal exact terms and conditions alterations and as Dell has kept old contracts online."
how unfair can the agreements be... we get enough statutory rights to make sure that nothing too bad can happen.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Finally some stories are kicking in that the balance is being pushed in favour of consumers instead of the other way.
I think corporations should be punished heavily when they try to get away with abusive practices to trim down the ammount of users that get abused and also to be fair to the corporations who really do make an effort in being fair.
After they change the online copies, of course, won't you be able to diff them with the Wayback Machine?
They say the mind is the first thing to
"We've changed the contract, but we aren't telling you how..."
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
That guy hit the nail on the head.
Nothing important, nothing final, nothing being made public. Pure speculation ensues.
Dell's customer service in Canada has fallen so far in Canada over the last 5-7 years that as an IT consultant, I now include "avoid Dell" in my equipment recommendations to my clients. I have read their legals and there are so many "escape clauses" built in that I doubt that Dell could be forced to service anything no matter the cause if they stuck to the exact letter.
Worse still is their telephone support. I often run across people whose Dell machines have run into problems, and where a clueless telephone support tech has caused them to lose all their machine's data. One client, a tax accountant, lost an extire tax season. I know, I know, backup data - but I think everyone here knows how likely you are to get most users to reliably do so. This is just one of many horror stories.
I would just love it if Dell Canada were forced to take on some accountability for its products. Then perhaps the small business people they have actually hurt would find they had more when fighting with Dell to get a machine they thought was under warranty working again. At least for now, some have found that their only remedy is to sue.
I wonder if OFT is also looking at Dells practice of advertising incredibly cheap computers then trying to convince people who call up to order that they need to pay an extra £100 to upgrade the RAM from 256Mb to 512Mb if they want to use broadband, because this PC they advertised "will only work with dialup". Or trying to upsell to the next model up, because this PC is end of line stock, and will "not work anymore in six months time".
I help my friends and family with their Dells whenever they need it, and every time I've had to contact Dell for support or drivers they have been very prompt and knowledgeable. Even for systems that are out of warranty or hella old.
Their chat system and website for drivers have been especially useful and very efficient.
I've never had to send anything in for warranty repair, so I can't comment on that.
-David
"All fires must be extinguished before the return of the product to Dell for servicing."
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
that I've worked on were all Dells. Two of them had the same motherboard, both of which were completely dead, and both of which were no older than six months. When I called Dell to request new motherboards (since the machines were under warranty) they promptly told me that they could not replace motherboards. They then offered to send me new heatsinks. Yes, because heatsinks dissipate heat so well when they're placed on a component that can't be turned on. I was never able to coax them to send me new motherboards. I now have two dissatisfied customers. Surely, someone should kick their ass.
Hey, I'd be pretty ticked at them too if they sold me a several-thousand-dollar network cable.
Dell carries out extremely deceptive marketing practices in the UK, they often advertise on TV and by mailshot really low price laptops and such, however if you phone up for the offer they wont sell you it and will offer you it at a higher price, even if you give the specific offer code. When I spoke to trading standards they acknowledged it's a problem but that as long as they can prove they've sold a few at that price then it doesn't matter if they then try and screw a few thousand other people on it.
Dell definitely needs kicking into shape, their customer support is attrocious and some of the tactics they use are borderline, or at least should be outright illegal.
It's just a shame that trading standards are merely getting them to change license agreement or whatever instead of really doing what needs doing - hitting them where it hurts with fines/legal proceedings as they deserve for their disgusting practices.
I was about to buy a laptop from them and did a little online research. The stories of incredible bad service that I read convinced me that it was too much of a gamble. Most of the stories revolved around people spending weeks and months trying to convince Dell that their hardware was broken so they could return it for repair. I didn't buy a laptop from them.
This situation is way past ironic. Dell got its start by convincing customers that it was safe to buy computers on line. The service was good. Dell sold good hardware that didn't break but if it did break, there was no problem getting a quick repair or a new machine. Boy, have things ever changed!
My WAG is that there won't be a Dell in five years.
What I find most interesting about Dell, is that unlike other companies, even their *sales* department is run by a call centre in India.
The comparison ends there, with Dell. In my experience they are helpful to a fault and bend over backwards to help you out. They are the true model of how Indian Call Centres should be: helpful to the economy but most importantly, helpful to the customer and so incredibly friendly they would do *anything* for you if their English ws good enough. As this article suggests, YMMV.
I'm typing this on my new Dell XPS .... when I ordered it, I only ordered one. When they confirmed it, they confirmed two. After 20 minutes of trying to find the phone number to call, I finally got the second order canceled. My next computer... I'm building myself. I'd rather get bloody knuckles than have to deal with this again.
"I hereby agree that I did not consider a computer equipped with an AMD processor. In fact, I don't even know what it tastes like."
Full Tilt
In other news, Dell has customer support!?! Wow, I had no idea. Where do I get the number for this customer support, instead of the number for the prescripted question answer line?
About 5 or 6 years ago, on my first Dell PC, my 40gig hdd died. I called them up, and by the end of the week had a brand new one in hand.
Just last week I realized I had left my OEM XP installation disc and Dell resource CD at my ex's house. Again, called them up and the next day had new ones at my door.
pSc
Proud Rememberer of the BBS Days.
You forgot the British 'u'
Actually, we go, "Oi, you! Noooooo!"
I work at a private school helping out the tech department. A few years ago, the middle school started a program requiring every student to purchase a certain laptop. The school now has around 150 Dells, in various latitude models. Getting dropped and abused in every manner, we also require the "complete coverage" plan, which is pretty much anything but batteries. It works very well, needing only about half an hour to set up a replacement or onsite repair of anything--screens, motherboards, whatever. The parts arrive next day; technicians usually arrive in two or three.
They have a phone line that isn't bad, but their chat is faster. You just enter the service tag, and verify the company or person that owns it. Infrequently you will be disconnected and have to retype all the information.
From my experience, with the expensive warranty, they are prompt and helpful. Then again, it is a business-class account, even though the computers themselves are owned privately.
... my friend and I decided to open up our own computer manufacturing/marketing/support corporation with the following guarantees:
1. When you call for support, your call will be answered by a tech support person in your own country and not by some hard-to-understand person from another country (i.e. your call will never be routed to India).
2. Your support contracts will be straight forward, to the point, and easy to understand. In addition, they will represent the best value we can offer for your well-spent support dollars.
We won't be the cheapest, but at least you'll get what you pay for. If Dell wants to support everything from India, then let them capture the PC market there. We'll take care of everyone here in the U.S. and expand slowly outwards to make sure we maintain outstanding support levels without having to outsource it to some third world country.
Any takers? We're looking for the following (in this order):
1. Investors
2. Employees
3. Customers
Drop me a line at insourced@gmail.com
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
"Chastise" is written with "s" even in American English.
After my 1 year old HP crapped out, and tech support tells me
1.) its out of warranty,
2.) no tech manuals exist so I can figure out how to take the darn thing apart and have a look,
3.) they will look at it for 300 bucks,
4.) if its a mobo problem (most likely scenario, it will be 900 bucks to fix it)
I'm afraid I threw a bit of a fit and smashed the laptop against the wall, then kicked it a few times.
"Are you ok?" asks the tech (who I did not yell at), "Yes, that was the sound of me kicking the crap out of the last HP product I will ever buy, for me or my clients. If you can, please let somebody know about how this little incident affected one little customer's view of HP." I try to make things better if I can...
Soooo...I now needed a new laptop. I bought a new Dell from some random dude off ebay. I put pre-release Dapper on it, which somehow was hosing the bios, making the thing unbootable AT ALL. Screwed, I thought. I am just SCREWED Called Dell, they did an ownership transfer so I have a warranty, and sent me docs on how to take the thing apart to get to the cmos battery.
Other times I have had to warranty stuff, they overnight me parts, and pay for shipping for the return too. I've had stuff out of warranty break, and they pick up the tab for overnight shipping AND don't gouge me on the part price (28 bucks for a power supply is quite reasonable).
I did despise Dell for their practice of advertising $499 systems that you somehow never could complete an order for for under $600, but the service has made up for that and more.
Hate to gush, and if they screw me over, I will dump on them just as hard, but for now Dell is doing a great job for me.
I recently got a Dell 30" display and there was a small issue with it. Not a big deal but I need to talk to customer service on the issue. I spoke to probably about 15 people over a couple of hours and they were all Indians most of whom thought the display was a television. I have never had worse customer service in my life; none of them took accountability and they just kept passing me off. Finally I bribed my more patient co worker buddy to talk to them and pretend he was me. I was at the end of my rope. He got the deal done and I bought him lunch for helping me out :) I have a couple of Dell displays and they are really great but their customer service is the WORST!
The problem is that Free Market ecnomies don't work in favor of the consumer, citizen or society, as history has shown. Try reading some modern economics, like from the last fifty years or so (and libertarian blog rantings don't count).
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
admin friends have told me about Dell Support.......
Dell support is going downhill. They have been outsourcing to foreigners reading off cue-cards that know diddly squat....
I tried to have a conversation with someone from Dell recently, it was very clear to me, that my colleagues were dead accurate about Dell Support.
More HP is the result.
What does aggravate me though, is Dell's continual B.S.-ing around when it comes to getting some AMD Opteron systems. I swear, as long as some dipshit company refuses to honor customer wishes, I'll be more than happy to steer my bosses to Dell competitors. Now they start to work on the AMD systems, with the advent of Woodcrest. What turds!
It is time for the Dell Hegemony to end with a whimper. Their service has gone downhill, as have their products.
Swan song, exit stage left.
... for someone who does not have the skill to build their own PC?
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Now I know why I've seen comments posted on the Internet that read:
Get your Unix fortune now!
It's like you didn't read the story or the posts. We can forgive any company one or two 'horror stories'. With Dell the sheer volume and the nature of the stories surpasses the other companies by a wide margin.
If you are going to buy something on line it is very important that you can trust the product. People will buy big ticket items at bricks and mortar stores where they can get support if they need it. Dell's major coup was to be so trustworthy that people were willing to buy their computers on line. They seem to have lost sight of that simple fact.
Hula-hoops are round, they're stayin' round, and they'll be a-round forever?
Possibly not.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Got it in one! Although I intended to reference the original comedy sketch!
There are no free markets anymore. There were free markets 100-200 years ago and the failed. They failed because the basic assumptions of the free market capitalists were wrong or at least could not exist in the real world. Although a few people became very very wealthy so I guess the free market worked for them.
Market transparency is a good one because it relates directly to the ability of a consumer to educate themselves about product offerings and make a choice. Consumer choice is one of the fundamental concepts of free market econ. Mess with choice and the whole thing unravles.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
This is from the Opie and Anthony show. They talked about the customer service from Dell. It's kinda long, but they sure nail the essence of the Dell Customer service.
http://www.therantshack.com/2005/07/20/dell-hell/
Don't buy the home lines (Dimension desktops, and low end laptops), the business models (Optiplex desktop) are much better.
"Warranty does not cover damage to equipment due to the use of water, fire extinguishers, or other extinguishing devices."
Sent from my iPhone
If you don't like their customer service, don't buy their products. The market will decide whether good customer service is worth the extra cost.
BZZT! Wrong!
They have to first have perfect knowledge of said "market". Otherwise that line of argument starts to fall flat, with Dell and the other offshorers' record being proof. Otherwise it's a bit better to a) bite the bullet and go with IBM when you can (heck, you still can get your abysmally low quality laptop or desktop, and in the same gray too!) and b) push for a forcible correction that actually has teeth. They're abusing their rights as a corporate "person" and accepting little or no responsibility.
No thanks, I'll go with Atlanta, Georgia or Denver, Colorado instead of some country that has little more than a bunch of paper CMM-5's. It's also why I look for machines that are built with European and/or US parts as the majority by construction. A bit dated but otherwise valid as an example, the RS/6000 7044-270, damn heavy but worth it- metal from Europe, plastic/PC boards made in the US, and a minority of the chips made from The Currency Dumper. Heck, you could even have made it with 50% or more US parts by dropping out the European metal and replacing it with US based metal to demonstrate that such machines are viable.
I think corporations should be punished heavily when they try to get away with abusive practices to trim down the amount of users that get abused and also to be fair to the corporations who really do make an effort in being fair.
Ever since corporations had it easy since the Butcher and US counterpart Reagan, customers worldwide have been fucked over and out. Just that if you do such a measure, you would have to make it a measure that has no loopholes and contains penalties too expensive to pass on to the consumer. How's about a 75% penalty spread across worldwide assets, with priority towards (permanent) removal of assets in countries with no labor protection laws? Damn nice, and would even bitchslap GM (who tried to drop unions with a nullified contract).
You abuse your rights, you face the consequences. Consumers should be able to get quality that they paid to get (even at the $399 level Dell has to obey the law), and not have to depend on the slow wheels of a failed "market" to correct themselves.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
A salesman (not for Dell obviously) once told me that Dell sometimes uses refurbished parts in new machines, and that it's mentioned in their Terms of Sale. Sure enough, the terms contained this: > Dell will ship products that have the functionality and performance of the products ordered, but changes between what is shipped and what is described in a specification sheet or catalogue are possible. The parts and assemblies used in building Dell products are selected from new and equivalent-to-new parts and assemblies in accordance with industry practices. Spare parts may be new or reconditioned. So how suspect is this? I have a feeling the salesman was blowing smoke because he couldn't match Dell's price. I haven't been able to find many complaints about this clause anywhere on the net.
My first computer was a Dell. I ordered it with a 14400 fax / 28800 data modem, a US Robotics Sportster (internal). What I didn't know, because at the time I was a newbie to Pcs and hardware, was that Dell had fitted a 14400 fax and data modem, not a 28800. By the time it dawned on me that I had been done like a kipper I had retired the PC from daily use because it was too slow.
Their marketing practices are not to great either. I have never been a customer and yet for months they persisted in spamming my fax with offers. I thought it would be fair that if they were sending me marketing material I would send them some too. But they didn't seem to want to buy my endless loop of black paper. Dell fax 1-800-818-341
.. until they outsourced most of their customer services operation. From my experience, Dell's current customer service team seems to be targeted on the number of customers they piss off per day.
- Ask for a complaint to be escalated? - no problem, you'll speak to the same fella in 2 weeks' time...
- Write in to the MD / Head of operations etcetc - no problem, you'll speak to the same fella in 3 weeks' time...
After an odyssey of to/fro-ing over a computer within warranty that wouldn't turn ON, my only recourse was to go to the https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/small claims court (very handy online service). Funnily enough, Dell settled out of court.
BTW, think Dell have a reputation for astroturfing, so watch out for all those "My Dell has worked fine for the last Millennia" comments...
I have seen Dell reps. try to extort 99.00 USD to tell a user to press "F11" to bring up the restore function in order to restore the Dell computer back to factory.
Customer service is not what it used to be at Dell.
Seriously, what is holding you back? How difficult is it to select some parts, buy a case and power supply, and put it together with some screws? I mean, this isn't the days of an Altair 8800 where you need to know something about soldering (btw - that's a good skill to pick up, too).
Ok - so maybe you don't have the skill, and are a bit afraid to try your hand with brand new stuff bought for a lot of mullah - I can certainly understand that. So, what to do about getting the skill? Simple:
Buy an old computer.
Heck, you might not even need to buy one, people throw out their "old" computers seemingly every day. If you don't want to scrounge the trash, though, go down to your local thrift store and scrounge there. You should be able to scare up an old 486 or pentium box for not too much (this weekend I bought at goodwill a Linksys 4-port router/firewall for $3.00 - works fine).
Take it home, get yourself a few screwdrivers (you will need at least a couple of phillips-head screwdrivers of two different sizes), and start!
First, take the cover off, and make sure the CPU, RAM, cards, etc - are all "seated" and connected properly, and that you have a hard drive, floppy drive, etc in the case. You might want a friend with you who knows what is what and how things go together to help you along. Once you have verified this, power it up, and see what happens. Hopefully, you will actually boot and won't run into any real problems. Basically, you want to get the system to boot all the way into an OS (DOS is fine here - you just want to know that it works somewhat OK). Write down what you see, how it works, what it recognizes, etc. Then turn it off.
Now for the "fun and learning" part. Start taking it apart (if you are paranoid here, use a wrist grounding strap)! Keep track of what goes where, what screw fits in what hole (important tip - if you think you might have a screw that only fits in one area, screw it back into the part after you remove it, so you don't lose it - this tip works wonders for automobile maintenance!), how things are oriented (especially cable ends if they aren't keyed!), where things are located, etc. If you have to, take pictures or draw diagrams on paper. Keep a lot of notes - this is your first time out - you wouldn't hike without a map, would you? Once you have it completely apart, stripped to an empty case, a few boards, cards, CPU (yeah, take the CPU and RAM out of the sockets), etc - take a rest. Get a sammitch and some soup. Relax. Don't look at it for a few hours. Play some Playstation or whatever.
Once you are rested, go back and put it back together (have your friend over, make it a learning experience he/she can help with). Remember to put everything back like you found it: CPU and heatsink together properly and oriented in the socket/slot right (you will need some new heatsink grease for this, unless the heatsink has been bonded to the CPU). Put the cards in, the cables connected back properly, the power supply hooked up, everything screwed down right. Check and double-check everything. You might want to take the opportunity to clean everything up with a spray can-'o'-air (do this outside if things are really dusty - trust me - and don't spin the fans with the air, you ruin bearings that way). Have your friend help you to make sure you are doing things right, etc.
Once you have it back together, and are sure of everything, power it up, and see what happens! Hopefully, you will boot into the same screen/status that you had before, and everything will look the same. If so - congratulations - you just "built" your first PC! If not, then you (and your poor friend - give him another beer) have some troubleshooting to do. Ultimately, you want the machine to boot just the same as it did before.
If you get through this crash course, try to repeat it, for good measure. Do it without your friend nearby, or wait a day or two between pulling it apart and putting it back together. Go back and buy a
Reason is the Path to God - Anon