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.
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.
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.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.