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New York Sues Dell for Poor Customer Service
Phanatic1a writes "New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is suing Dell, alleging bait and switch financing tactics, false advertising, and 'numerous other deceptive business practices relating to their technical support services, promotional financing, rebate offers, and billing and collection activity.' According to Cuomo himself, 'At Dell, customer service means no service at all.'"
For some reason I actually paid for an extended warranty on the Vaio I bought at Bestbuy. Strangely enough, I got some value out of it...
They replaced a DVD writer that failed, and a keyboard (the P fell off while I was typing). My biggest complaint was that when I picked up my laptop, I needed to wait for about 40 minutes. No geeks were in sight most of that time.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
I kid you not, I just finished a gold support call to Dell for a server. They were prompt and courteous. They didn't know how to fix it offhand, but called me back quickly with the right information. The guy even spoke English, which was a very pleasant surprise.
Is a loan sharking operation which will charge you 29.99% APR. I quickly transferred my balances and will never use that service again.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
and if your big enough you can take part in dells warrenty parts direct program, and just place the replacement part orders directly and not even deal with phone support... just get the damn new parts drop shipped... this is something that is very awsome that dell does. allows us to fix stuff with out ever needing to talk to a phone support person.
Had the misfortune to call Linksys recently too. An entire Saturday wasted going through the first-layer support morons, who were just reading the scripts from their screens. Some of them — reading so slowly, I could not help thinking, they are on drugs. Others — lying that the supervisor is "on a meeting"...
Finally, someone had brains enough to realize, the problem is above his level and transfered me to the second level support person, who quickly understood, what I was saying all along, and proceeded to tell me, how to cold-reset the wonder Linux-router, which promptly fixed the problem — 6 hours after the first phone call to Linksys...
Don't know, if any amount of legal prosecution can help against this sort of moronity.
The main legal beef of this prosecution, I guess, are the (alleged) financing/collection irregularities — a heavily legislated and regulated area. The populist "no service at all" rhethorics are just thrown in to help Mr. Guomo repeat Mr. Spitzer's feat later on...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If you want to sue someone for terrible customer service practices, I can add a few more necks to the gallows.
How about...
COMCAST - Customer service is non-existent. Advertised cable-internet speeds are excessively exaggerated. Bills constantly increase, yet service level goes down. They even have the balls to ADVERTISE on their own guide system. If they're making advertising money by putting ads on my screen while I'm browsing channels, that should be money OFF my bill, not added to it.
VERIZON - Customer service is horrible. Expect to talk to at least 3 or 4 people to solve any problem more complex than simply paying the balance on your bill. Also, ANY CHANGE that you make to your Verizon account somehow ends up adding a year to your contract with them. I don't understand how this is possibly legal.
While we're at it, let's just completely ditch cell-phone contracts. I should be able to get a decent phone service plan without signing my life away. Predatory lenders have less complex contracts.
Not true with Dell - I have a credit score of almost 800 but Dell still wouldn't offer me anything under 22%, so I just used a different financing method. Though in Dell's credit they didn't try to bait and switch me, the details were quite clear from the beginning.
Recently I had a problem with my printer and it took 27 calls over 3 days and about 16 hours of waiting on the phone and talking to Indian after Indian whom couldn't answer my problem. My problem isn't with Indians as I have many of them as friends and Indians are very smart people. My problem is with Dell outsourcing to India and giving them no power to correct even the smallest of issues. Basically if it's not on their troubleshooting sheet they have in front of them chalked up with canned questions/answers, then you are SOL.
When are companies going to understand that they may get a first time buyer with their cut-rate prices. But if that buyer ever has a problem with the hardware and receives cut-rate support, they are not going to buy from the same company again.
Just one reason I buy HP.
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Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
Dangit, I agree with you: I'm sick of people who are unclear on the concept of just what a "free market" is.
... why use it to mean anything else?
"Free market" implies that there is no single party or group that has control over a market, not just governments. A single company (e.g. Microsoft in the OS space), or a cartel (e.g., the RIAA member companies) that can dictate the vast bulk of a market's behavior thus means the market is no longer free or capable of the self-correcting behavior that are the benefits of a free market.
Gas prices are high because a single cartel, OPEC, dictates the price per barrel. This is not a free market.
California's "deregulation" was more appropriately a "re-regulation," and was only called "deregulation" for marketing purposes. It failed to help end consumers, of course, because they really don't have a choice where their power comes from; there's no way to go to the corner store and buy a few kilowatt-months to take home and keep in the fridge til ya need them. In other words, it's a market that is necessarily never free, because you always have one company controlling delivery.
It keeps being used only in the sense of "no government interference," which is just wrong. Maybe that's an accepted meaning, but since a market dominated by any entity or cartel cannot be free and does not have the benefits of a really free market, then
Well, if a large portion of NY citizens are being routinely shafted by Dell, it certainly is simpler for the AG to sue than for the court system to handle hundreds of individual cases. Also, Attorney Generals arepublic servants. It is okay for them to do something nice for their citizens. This is exactly the kind of case that regular people can benefit from. Just because it doesn't involve the mafia or large sums of money doesn't mean that this case is not worth the time.
OK, I saw the bit on the news. The woman had paid for "in-home" support (300 bucks I think) and they would not come out. Maybe I'm crazy, but "in-home" is pretty clear. It means I call, they come. If dell can't do this for 300, then they should not have offerred it. When I bought a big-screen, I got "in-home" support (500/5 years with yearly cleaning & adjustment including). When the TV died, I called, they came a day later, not 3 freakin months later as was the case for this poor woman. The woman was not tech-savvy at all. She did some kind of knitting biz. So she did the smart thing, she paid for service and did not get it. No idea what "gold" service from dell means. "In-home" is pretty clear though.
I had a terrible time with Dell - but I think it was because they were poorly managed and not because they intentionally set out to be underhanded. I bought a highly rated and well reviewed 2007WFP monitor. It used a S-IPS type panel well regarded as a superior panel to other panel types for photography. The problem was that after a few months Dell began a "panel lottery" and would randomly swap out the S-IPS panels and use low quality S-PVA panels instead. The quality of the Dell S-PVA image was not comparable at all. The S-PVA made dark areas seem darker face on, and a viewer had to tip side to side to see details. Many people were upset to buy a superior Dell monitor and instead have an inferior monitor delivered. There were revolts in Dell forums and the staff there seemed stuck between rocks and hard places. However, Dell also undersold it's superior monitors capabilities on its web site. The speed of its 2007WFP was given as 16ms when it was actually faster (6ms gtg). Supposedly the slower time was meant to allow for the use of slower panels without having to explain any slower times when the superior panels were switched for inferior ones. I know other manufacturers also swap parts out (HP no longer lists what panels are used in its monitors) but Dell was really sloppy about swapping inferior panels for superior ones. It was like putting a Taurus engine in a BMW. Trying to get panels exchanged was both very easy and very hard. Dell didn't refuse exchanges and many people returned monitors 2 or 3 times until they got a S-IPS panel. I returned my first monitor because of stuck pixels. My exchange monitor was the poor quality S-PVA. Dell "forgot" to send return shipping label for monitor number one so I was stuck with two monitors. I now knew I didn't want a Dell anyway but instead wanted an NEC 20WMGX2 (most awesome monitor I ever owned). Well to cut a long story short it took two months of over two dozen calls, case numbers, dropped calls, etc to get monitors returned. I lot of the service people seemed nice enough and they seemed like they wanted to help but from one person to the other the system seemed to break down. To me it just seemed like chaos and not criminal intent. A compnay trying to gouge people doesn't let them make 2,3,4 returns at their cost no questions asked. They don't hide their best selling statistics. This is my opinion after many hours stuck in this situtation from Nov 06 to Feb 07. Dells accounting was so bad they counting even refund the CC I used with PayPal and they had to send me a check after 4 weeks of mishaps on their end. I can't say Dell didn't ask for trouble because they were awful. But I don't think they were criminal as much as poorly managed. I am sure there are worse companies out there.
I can totally understand the issues with Dell's Financial Services. Our company was a victim of theirs as well. It took 4 months to finally convince our sales rep to STOP setting us up withtheir Financial Services plan and just invoice us outright.
Their technical support on the other hand really isn't all that bad if you know what to ask for. (Of course we do pay for premium) It's not as good as Sun's tech support but I've had much worst response issues with companies like Gateways 2000 PCs back when I was supporting those. I'd give Dell an above average rating for their tech support.
Well... 99% of US businesses would be violating laws in my home country, Norway. On all areas, marketing, pricing, service, warranties etc. Why? Simply because the laws require honesty and has clear regulations as to what is allowed, what the companies obligations to their customers are etc. I haven't seen many TV commercials during my 10+ years here in the US that would have been allowed back home.
In USA, the customer is without rights in most cases and the corporations can do what the heck they want. Not to mention they can tell you lies without consequences. Example: The stupid commercial fro free credit reports. $30 or more per month is the cost for those "free" reports. Free, my ass.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Can we please stop putting the names of New York attorney generals in the articles. This guy (I won't say his name, don't want to help his google ranking) just wants to follow the Guiliani/Spitzer tactic of suing big name companies and "standing up for the little guy" even when it's not actually prudent (I'm not judging this case one way or another).
So, I had a broken A key on a laptop. The damned thing fell off completely. I call up Dell support expecting them to immediatly send out a new keyboard pad. After 45 minutes on hold, the rep decides to take me through Dells little software troubleshooter program they load. I interrupt him "whoa, wait. I am holding the key in my hand! It is completely detached from the keyboard!" His response, "oh...ok...so click on Hardware..." And he continues on with the software troubleshooting!! At the end he asks me if it fixed the issue. I told him "no, I'm still holding the key in my hand." Finally he says "ok, we'll send you out a new keypad"
This is not true. OPEC exists to keep oil prices high
Wrong. OPEC's goal is to keep PROFITS high. Getting the highest profits does NOT result from arbitrarily high prices. But, when producers collaborate, the price at which profit is maximized is higher than where it would be if producers competed. THAT's the goal of a cartel - eliminate downward price pressure caused by competition.
But, even the cartel has long and short term pressures on the oil price. In the short term, if the price goes too high, they move past the optimum point, the decreased volume of sales is not offset by the increased margin, and their profits actually go down. And even if they are at the optimal short-term price point for maximizing profits, in the LONG term, if the short-term price is so high that other people start investing in technology that ultimately reduces the demand for oil, then again, OPEC loses out on profits because in 5 or 10 years, everyone's car runs Ethanol or Vegetable Oil and demand for oil plummets. One of the big reasons we don't have more alternative energy now is that comparatively, gas has been cheap, so there wasn't any incentive to develop something else.
OPEC wants high profits - but to get high profits over the long term, they want to keep oil prices reasonable in the short term to discourage investment in alternative energy sources.
paintball