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Dell Found Guilty of Fraud, False Advertising
Last year, the Attorney General of New York instigated a lawsuit against Dell for practices like long hold times, repeated call transfers, and disconnects for customers waiting for phone support — all of which make it harder to cash in on promises of (and paid-for) technical support." Now, raptor78 writes "IDG News reports on New York Attorney General's victory over the poor services and deceptive practices employed by Dell over the past years with regards to technical support and promotional offers. It is about time someone spoke up and realized some of the horrors people deal with at Dell." Another reader points to a quick report from Fortune magazine on the ruling.
While it's great that a big corporation is being held liable for false advertising, aren't there worse examples out there than computer technical support? What about false advertising for medicines, diets, and health-related products and services? Alternative medicine is one gigantic - and very dangerous - scam. What about all the food product labeling - low fat, organic, and all that meaningless garbage that is totally deceptive? And what about the goddamn P3N15 3nlArgment pi11s I paid through the nose for - those farking things didn't work AT ALL!
A-Bomb
Simple games theory. If the expected payoff of fraud is greater than the penalty, fraud is inevitable. Here's a thought: instead of fines, revoke the corporate charter for serious crimes. Only in America can people still get the death penalty while corporations can't.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It'll soon be cheaper to run a call center in the USA than in India or Mexico.
So quality of service should go up or the language barrier should go down. May not go hand in hand, but I think majority of the issues are caused by the language barrier anyway.
You don't always get what you pay for - that's what the trial was all about. You do, however, usually pay for what you get, although not always.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You are talking out your ass. How do you expect to maintain economies of scale without large-scale corporate entities to provide the necessary structure?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
What it doesn't support is multiple processors, which is a non-issue for the market XP Home is intended for.
We deal exclusively with Dell, (about 800 end user units and 75 servers) their business support is indeed top notch. I was somewhat dismayed when I called in on my parents home system a year ago and ended up in India with someone reading from a script in broken English without any idea how to troubleshoot.
It depends on who you are, what you bought, what time you call and luck of the dice....
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Heh, there are plenty of Americans that are difficult to understand, especially as you go further south. The ones that pronounce the letter "R" with two syllables drive me nuts (sounds almost like they're attempting to say "error"), and there's usually a lot of "could you rephrase that please?" coming from me. Pronunciation aside, there are also quite a few Americans that have such horrible grammar that you need a linguistics degree to figure out what they are trying to communicate.
And I'll tell you right now that their testing/training does not qualify someone to actually work on their products. You really need the hands-on experience, which you don't get with their testing/training process.
I can attest to this - I worked for Dell for three years until they just recently shut down our call center (the Edmonton site, in Canada - curse our rising dollar!). For the past year my job was to field calls from the onsite technicians Dell sends out to fix laser printers. They'd call in having no idea what they were supposed to do, and would frequently make the problem worse in their struggles, prompting me to replace the whole printer rather than trying to replace the parts the tech broke, since it would just be the same inexperienced/untrainable tech going back out with the new parts. It wasn't always a training or documentation issue either though, these contracted locals were often bottom-of-the-barrel labor force types that had no concept of basic troubleshooting. You get what you pay for.
Dell doesn't do onsite service. They outsource it to Unisys and BancTec. Don't expect better service from HP as they do the same.
As far as quality of the actual systems goes, all of the pieces, if not the final assembly, are done by ASUS, Foxconn and a handful of other overseas companies. Dell and HP are marketing and distribution companies.
Anecdotal evidence of support problems will not prove a case either way. Statistically all of the major hardware companies are very similar. Shipments to support cases is around 4%.
The reason everyone (and I do mean everyone) has shitty support. Is that tech support is a shit job. Anyone who has ever worked the phones will tell you this. Most techs last around 6 months to a year. Consumer support, speaking with the unwashed masses, 8 to 12 hours a day, trying to squeeze bits of useful information out of the lady on the other end of the line who thinks her monitor is her computer. Who installed Microsoft Live Support AND Norton 360 with all the addons even though their system with Preloaded with McAfee. The guy sticking floppy disks in jewel cases and shoving them in the CD drive. Angry people trying to get you too pay their phone bill because they downloaded a porn dialer. The guy with wire snips trying to cut his AGP video card to make it fit in a PCI Express slot. Who is pissed off because everyone keeps telling him he can't.
*twitch*
Anyone that even comes close to having a clue will find a better job. I promise.
Quite a few people do not seem to get the difference between corporate accounts (thousands, if not millions of dollars in revenue) and end users, the ones who are getting a shaft.
The rule and this whole deal is only about the end users who watched an ad and decided to apply for a loan or purchased some sort of a deal promised by Dell. These are the guys who got the short end of the stick.
We have had nothing but good things to say about Dell. Replacement parts always arrived ahead of schedule. Calls were prompt and right on target. Dell service was superb. That is because we are corporate customer that spends tons of money on their hardware and service. The cheapest servers that we buy cost several laptops. The performance machines that we get cost just as much as cars.
The problem described in the article is related to end users who expect XYZ and end up getting something different. This is a no brainer. If you get a computer for $700, then do you really expect a qualified person to talk to you for hours about a problem? Anybody who is remotely qualified to do such support will probably ask for $15-20 per hour. This means that several long phone calls from the same customer will wipe out the profit that you made on sale. I am sorry to break this to everybody, but hardware is becoming a commodity , much like Windows, and you are expected to know and act in a certain manner if you buy a laptop and get into a problem. No company in the right mind will hire qualified engineers, let's say the ones that can do Tier II and Tier III support, to answer phones. You do that and your business will die because you WILL NOT make any profit.
Dell is much like any other large business. They have plenty of customers and they generate plenty of revenue. If you don't like it, go get an Apple because Dell has another customer lined up already. They will make tons of money by dealing with large businesses and universities and people who are simply stuck with Dell because they don't want any other alternatives. Telling Dell or Microsoft that their end-user support sucks is like telling Bank of America that you're closing an account due to whatever reason.
Long story short:
Never attribute anything to malice which can be explained by incompetence.
You say "right" as if what's "right" for business is the "right" thing to do.
Just because a profit is reliably turned, does not mean that the entity in question isn't morally bankrupt.
I could reliably turn over a large profit selling young boys in southwest Asia, but that doesn't make it "right".