Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Dude, you're getting a lawsuit.
That's an interesting theory, but I think it has more to do with Cuomo following the Eliot Spitzer School of Getting Yourself Elected Governor of New York. It mostly involves bringing high profile cases against nationally recognized big corporations.
Like bragging about their customer support, but then when you do call them up, you get some foreign person with an accent you can't understand talking over a phone connection that makes him barely audible, that you can only speak to after being redirected for a few hours, and who will then tell you your hard drive needs replaced because there's something wrong with the fan in your power supply? That may not be illegal, but it would be nice if they changed that.
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.
Apathy
If we don't take care of the customers, maybe they will stop bugging us.
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.
Prices are high on gas because the cost of production is high? How do you back up that statement? Gas is high because of massive mismanagement, inadequate processing facilities, and large amounts of capacity being offline for either shoddy maintenance (Pipelines rusting out) or really sketchy reasons. (The big facility in Oklahoma explodes because of a lightning strike? These people never heard of lightning rods and proper grounding? If there's no oxygen supply in a big tank, then you can hit it with lightning all day long and nothing can ignite.)
This is all bullshit caused by the deregulation of the industry. Look how well deregulation of the energy market worked for California, rolling blackouts, raging high prices, etc. Required public services needed for the basic functionality of our society should NEVER be deregulated, cause all it does is let unethical traders get rich of scamming the whole system.
I know, all you "free market" clones will fry me for stating the obvious, but the free market doesn't exist without government regulation in the first place. Free market is just an euphemism for "quick buck", not a long term, stable solution.
If you buy a machine from dell, and it comes pre-loaded with software. When that software acts up, dell should be responsible. If dell doesn't want to take responsibility, then don't install 3rd party software.
When I purchased my car (a honda actually), I had the dealership install an after market remote starter. When I had trouble, guess who I brought it to. Guess who fixed it ? The dealership.
Now, had I bought it from Best Buy I would have brought it back to Best Buy.
It's really about bait & switch tactics in their finance arm, attracting people with 0% offers then denying even those with good credit, making them pay 20% or more finance fees. "The lawsuit accuses Dell of luring consumers to purchase its products with advertisements that offered attractive "no interest" and/or "no payment" financing promotions. In practice, however, the vast majority of consumers, even those with very good credit scores, were denied these deals. In a classic "bait and switch" scheme, DFS instead offered consumers financing at high interest rates, which often exceed 20%. Dell and DFS frequently failed to clearly inform these consumers that they had not qualified for the promotional terms, leaving many to unwittingly finance their purchase at high interest rates." THAT is what it is really about. The rest is just to throw on a little more on top, to scare Dell, and more importantly to make the public support it.
-Daniel
http://www.oag.state.ny.us/consumer/consumer_issu
Developers: We can use your help.
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
Look how well deregulation of the energy market worked for California
The California energy market was NEVER deregulated. They just changed the regulations. And when they changed the regulations, companies like Enron figured out how to exploit the new rules in order to get profit for doing nothing.
Basically, when California's energy market was 'deregulated', new rules were put in place that set the cost of power based on congestion - the more demand there was for the power lines over which the power was transmitted, the more money you paid for that power.
So the energy companies just moved power around essentially in circles, creating more artificial demand, and inflating the cost of power.
If the California energy market had been ACTUALLY deregulated, California's utilities wouldn't have been forced by regulation to pay too much for power, and there would have been more than enough power at reasonable prices to go around because the statutory incentive for the power distribution companies to artificially inflate demand wouldn't have existed.
So, in short, it was REGULATIONS that caused the rolling blackouts, NOT a lack of them.
paintball
Best Buy is actually a good place to buy computers, as long as they're low quality. Why? Their extended warranty has a "three strikes and you're out clause" whereby after the computer has been serviced three times, if it breaks again they give store credit for a replacement. So, the procedure is as follows:
My family went through this cycle about five times over about the past decade, starting with a refurbished Packard Bell 486 desktop and ending with a 20" iMac Core Duo (and no, we did not break anything on purpose, or be overly rough with our machines). Also, I don't count Apple as "crappy," although it should be noted that Best Buy replaces Macs on the first service instead of the fourth, because it doesn't have the facilities to repair them.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I'm not sure how many of the /. crowd are familiar with the concept of service level, so I figured I'd pass this along:
For any company that is worth a flip, they measure a statistic called service level. When you call a customer service number for a company, all of the calls are tracked on their telephony switches. I'm sure everyone is familiar with having to wait on hold to talk to someone. The actual metric of service level is "the target of answering X percent of calls in X seconds or less". So to measure this, if Company A has a service level goal of 80% answered in 45 seconds, and by chance they answered all of their calls for the day in 45 seconds or less, they have achieved 100% for the day. (This would technically be cost inefficient because they had too many people answering the phones, but I'll save that for another day). In this example, the company wants to end up at an 80% achievement for the day. They hit 100%, so they overserviced. Good for the customer, bad for the company's budget.
Depending on the industry, service level targets range anywhere from 80%/45 seconds for credit cards, home/cell phones, etc. Industries like sales, product activations, etc. have a much higher percentage, such as 90%/20 seconds... If the user is trying to buy something, a long wait time makes the customer impatient and they'll hang up resulting in a lost sale opportunity. For industries like computer tech support, the service levels are much, much different. A call for a computer user is going to be much longer than someone who calls their credit card company to complain about an over-the-limit fee. For tech support type calls, the service level will usually be something in the neighborhood of 70%/240 seconds.
You may be wondering how this relates to the Dell story? Last bit of information I received (approx. a month ago), Dell's computer tech support service level was 60%/20 MINUTES. Yes, that is minutes, not seconds. This means that if they answer 60% of their tech calls in 20 minutes or less, they feel they are providing a proper service to their customer.
I'm not surprised in the slightest to see this lawsuit. I'm actually surprised to see that is has taken this long.
I worked in Dell support many years ago. Based on the summary it sounded like support had really gone down hill since then. There were really two types of issues described in the fine article: financing and support.
The financing complaints all sound totally legitimate.
The support stuff all sounds like the same old stuff people griped about when I worked there. People griped about this stuff because they didn't read their support contract. Both parties have their end to hold up. In my personal experience, Dell balks at supporting customers who refuse to hold up their end. Yes, this means removing the cover from the PC to troubleshoot. Yes, this means determining what's wrong with the machine over the phone before sending out an on-site tech. Yes, this means you're getting refurbished service parts. These things are all part of how Dell makes money and keeps prices competitive. No one has to take the deal. But once you accept it you can't expect to change the rules to suit your preferences.
-Peter
Look, you may not like the 29.9% rate --- but it is 100% legal and 100% voluntary. The rates that credit cards (of all kinds) charge you are very very high and you certainly have the right NOT to use them. If you didn't read the fine print, that is 100% your problem. Not Dell's.
My question to you is this: why in the fuck are you buying a depreciating consumer item when you do not have the money to afford it?
I really, truly, do not understand some people's financial decisions. Leasing cars, paying ridiculously high APR's....and then wondering why, after all these years of hard work, they are poor.
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