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.

Comments

It's just business?

[autophile]

I like this quote at the end of the article. Are they ha ha only serious?

...Dell said in a statement. "We believe that our customer service levels are at or above industry standards."

Re:It's just business?

[qortra]

I'm willing to bet that average end users get a much different experience then corporate customers, but I can provide my experience as a corporate customer.

The small business at which I work purchases Dells in low volume, and has a few smaller Dell servers (really, glorified NAS units). Their support for our company has been exceptional. Just troll through my posts to see that I am absolutely not a Dell shill - I dislike Windows, I dislike Dell supplied crapware, I think their systems are ugly, and I would never personally purchase a Dell. However, all those things aside, corporate and server support is truly excellent at Dell. When I have problems (which is comparatively rare), I get personally attention, overnight shipping of replacements, people who speak flawless English, and courteous follow-ups after the problem has presumably been solved.

One might claim that, by supporting their small-business clients well, it makes their poor consumer support all the more inexcusable - I won't argue that point one way or the other. All I can say that is that there are support sub-infrastructures at Dell that are excellent.

Re:It's just business?

[AKAImBatman]

I find they generally have a lower failure rate than other manufacturers I have used in the past, and their tech support has been second to none.

To offer a counter-point, my last place of work saw regular failures with our Dell server equipment. My personal favorite was when the SQL Server database went offline and no one could figure out why. At first it appeared to be a disk failure. But if that was the case, why didn't the RAID array continue working with the other drives? Turns out, the RAID controller failed. Corrupted all the data on the disks, too. We had to pull the previous day's backup and apologize to customers that the day's data had been lost. (Thankfully it happened on a Saturday.)

Re:It's just business?

[SatanicPuppy]

Pack it in schill. I had 5 servers with bad RAID cards a few years back (PERC 3 cards) and they managed to utterly corrupt the raid in almost every case, to the point where it could not be rebuilt but only restored from backup. It's only almost because I refused to let the guy touch it the last time, and, magically, that time it recovered normally.

I've had printer techs who couldn't take a printer apart. I've had server technicians who couldn't handle basic terminology. I had hours and hours of sitting on the phone with optiplex capacitor problems trying to convince them to just fricking replace the motherboard like they claimed they were doing on their website. This is fricking GOLD corporate support here! I'm glad they got nailed, they richly deserved it.

Just as a footnote, we switched to HP about 18 months ago, and I have no idea what their customer service is like because we haven't had to call it yet.

Re:It's just business?

[Volante3192]

I'm willing to bet that average end users get a much different experience then corporate customers, but I can provide my experience as a corporate customer.

Based on personal experience, you'd win that bet.

Laptop my boss purchased for personal use, Latitude (well, consumer line...I don't recall if that's the Latitude or not). Busted keyboard. Literally ended up taking MONTHS to get it replaced.

Stupid techs never listened to the diagnostics, best part was it got shipped to a repair depot, they turn it on, "Computer turns on fine. User needs to type password in." was the return. NEVER actually typed anything otherwise they'd see the keys jam and repeat.

Fortunatly, since the initial issue was placed before the warranty expired, all work was done under warranty (even though it was finally fixed 4 months AFTER the expiration date.)

However, on our Optiplexes and Inspirons, service is all but flawless. PowerEdge support is like five nines of satisfaction, and the PowerVault tape loaders? Best. Support. EVER. They'll literally bend over backwards to support those devices.

I cannot, for the life of me, recall one single instance where I have been completely disappointed by Dell support on our business class products, and we've had to call in about 40 LCDs, 40 HDs, 30 PSUs, and single digit quantities of mobos, cd-rom drives, RAM, and LTO tapes.

Re:It's just business?

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked as a phone tech support guy for Dell, and I'm of two minds about this.

On the one hand, at no point was I ever encouraged to give less than anything but the highest quality service. There was no "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" about getting customers off the phone without really helping them, no prodding - subtle or otherwise - to cut corners. We were required to stay on a call for as long as it took to get it right, even though call times were of course monitored.

However, they treated us like crap. Although Dell had put a fair amount of time into training the techs, we were treated like service employees rather than technical professionals, and there were never enough people. Trust me, when you, as a customer, were sitting on hold for hours at a time, it wasn't because the call center folks were goofing off or whatever. It's because we were backed up like you wouldn't believe, because Dell was too cheap to hire enough technicians.

I worked for Dell tech support, and I've had three friends who did as well. There was/is absolutely no conspiracy to deny customers their service - on an individual-call level, Dell demands high quality performance from its techs. However, there was/is systemic disregard for the techs, their expertise, and their workloads, which led to, naturally, a shortage of highly qualified individuals (meaning that in many cases, Dell could only hire marginally qualified people, like myself), which exacerbated hold times as well as lowered the quality of service once the customer got a technician to talk to. There were also some glitches in the system as far as how transfers between departments were handled.

Customers never *intentionally* received the short shrift at Dell. We were all working as hard as we could. But poor employment practices often undercut customer service.

Re:It's just business?

[UncleTogie]

I called in to cancel my service, it took over an hour of getting transferred around and each person had about 3 different sale pitches to toss at me...

I found a great way to deal with the "sales-pitch-when-you're-trying-to-cancel-service" routine...

Growl.

Seriously...growl.

When they start the sales pitch, just start growling to yourself softly, and increase the volume every few seconds or so. It's funny as hell to hear them break off nervously in the middle of the pitch, and gives you the space to ask "Do you need any other info to complete the disconnection?" If they repeat, just do it again. I've yet to see/hear the marketer that can complete a pitch whilst hearing this...

Re:It's just business?

[greyspectre]

Customers never *intentionally* received the short shrift at Dell. We were all working as hard as we could. But poor employment practices often undercut customer service. Exactly. As an escaped Dell tech (four years clean and sober, thank god!), I can verify that we were absolutely required to support our customer through to resolution of problem, 100% of the time. If we had to send parts, we sent parts. If we needed a tech and parts, we sent a tech and parts. If they needed a system replacement, we could swing that too.

Where things fell short was in the quality of people that they chose. The Gold Technical Support team was advertised as the equivilant of Tier II consumer support at Tier I. The ad for the job indicated that 'advanced technical skill' was a requirement. I thought that I could put my skills to use in such an environment, and it wouldn't be like the wonderful folks I worked with at HP DeskJet support while I was in college.

When I got there, it was apparent that they were picking these people up off the street by driving up next to them, slinging a bag over their head, and dragging them to the training classes. If you could breathe through your mouth and manage to read a script, you were good enough to be on the front lines of Dell's premier technical support.

Once you were inside, things changed. If you went over the desired average call time, you would have a Tier II standing at your desk, asking if they could "help" so you could move on to the next person. It wasn't because call time was so much a strict requirement as much as we always were 150+ deep in queue, and there was a two minute answer time guarantee. Of course, the center was only ever half-full, with 350 people on-duty for freaking Monday morning, and more than half of those employed because they had a pulse and could read. The return for this sojurn in paradise was a pool table in the break room, and a sandwich machine that only ever seemed to have ancient egg salad sandwiches in it. Needless to say, I escaped.

Now, as an IT admin, I choose Dell because I know how to game the system to get what I need, when I need it, every time. I have no illusions as to the inherent quality of their wares, and I would never purchase something from the consumer side of things.

I also never, ever call on Monday.

Re:It's just business?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's just business?

[Divebus]

I found a great way to deal with the "sales-pitch-when-you're-trying-to-cancel-service" routine...

Tangential to this is dealing with Telemarketers. I do the "We Don't Use That" method which I found on the Internet somewhere - and it works:

TM: How much copier toner do you need today?
ME: We don't use copiers.
TM: You don't? How about printers?
ME: We don't print anything either. Not one printer here.
TM: Oh... Ok, then have a nice day.

TM: You've won 4 days and 3 nights at Time Share Harbor in Orlando.
ME: Sorry, I can't travel. I'm under house arrest for the next eight years.
TM: Oh... uh... sorry to bother you. Goodbye.

TM: Hi, I'm with MegaTeleNet and we can aggregate all your phone and Internet services
ME: We don't use Internet and this is a payphone.
TM: Don't use Internet? How does your business survive without Internet?
ME: Don't need it - all of our customers are walk-ins.
TM: Oh... sorry to bother you. Goodbye.

TM: Hi, we can save your business thousands of dollars with our new light bulbs.
ME: We don't use light bulbs here.
TM: You don't? How do you see anything?
ME: Everything here is natural lighting and we leave at dusk.
TM: Oh... sorry to bother you. Have a nice day.

TM: Would you like to save a bundle on long distance?
ME: We don't use any long distance service.
TM: You don't make any long distance calls?
ME: No, all of our customers are local.
TM: Oh... sorry to bother you.

Of course the correct answer to the last one is "We use Skype."

Re:It's just business?

[elrous0]

I had a friend who would always answer telemarketing calls with "Could you call back later? I'm masturbating"

This is a no-brainer

[moderatorrater]

Provide the damn support. Make it simple, easy to use and easy to understand. Support's the sort of thing that makes you customers for life or loses customers for life. Giving them long hold times, poor service, or even someone with an accent will taint their experience with that product forever. Whenever someone comments on the computer, the owner will tell the story of the bad service. When they go to buy their next computer, they'll buy anywhere else unless there's a very compelling reason to stick with Dell.

p.s. the accent comment also means any strong accent, even southern or north eastern ones. Strong accents are, however, easier to find outside of the country.

Re:This is a no-brainer

[oodaloop]

the accent comment also means any strong accent, even southern or north eastern ones. Yeah, there's nothing I hate more than calling tech support and getting Mayor Quimby.

Re:This is a no-brainer

[SwordsmanLuke]

True story: An Indian telemarketer called my brother one day and gave his name as "Abraham Lincoln." Apparently, they had been instructed to use Western names...

Triumph or tragedy?

[Bombula]

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!

Re:Triumph or tragedy?

[SatanicPuppy]

So holding a company accountable is a bad thing because they didn't hold every company accountable at the same time?

Whenever one company is held accountable it makes it easier for others to be held accountable.

Anyway, the class action suits do a decent job of holding big pharma in check. Juries just don't give out the same awards because your computer repair was a couple of days late.

Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[spun]

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.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[spun]

So, you are saying that corporations that commit crimes, up to and including murder, should get away with a slap on the wrist because government is what? Worse than murder?

Why present a false dichotomy? Are you so intellectually bankrupt and slavishly devoted to your dogma of greed-driven, unrestricted capitalism that you can't think up any possible alternatives?

Or maybe you just think the status quo is just peachy?

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[AshtangiMan]

This is a great idea. I think one of the worst things that happened to American corporate culture was the removal of the periodic renewall of the charter. This was put to a general vote of the region hosting the corporation, and gave the people a chance to revoke a corporations charter because of poor business practices, excessive polluting, or some other offensive behavior. This would be good for market based capitalism, as it would provide not only an incentive to do "good" for the region, but give small companies a chance to swoop in and take over for the bloated corporate entities that spiraled into the profit optimized corruption model.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[Penguinisto]

If a corporate charter gets revoked, the government doesn't suddenly own it (unless there's some extreme circumstance, they can't). What would be more likely to happen is that the condemned corp gets split into divisions, its assets may be sold off to the highest bidders (or given as compensation to a plaintiff), shut down and dissolved, or any combination of the three (e.g. dissolve parts of a corp while selling off the rest, etc).

Also, whatever happens to the corps, the board members get to eat the penalties (e.g. Enron's board members being held criminally liable in proportion to involvement, etc).

I rather like the idea of the Corporate Death Penalty... sell off|dissolve|split the creature, and hold each individual board member civilly and/or criminally liable. If a CEO knows that no golden parachute will save his ass from being forcibly separated from his personal possessions and money, maybe he'll think a little before deciding to perpetrate fraud, monopolistic predations, and etc.

/P

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[Tufriast]

I use to a work for a company that did outsourcing for Dell named Stream. Flat out - I will admit we turned away as many people as possible. We offered hardware support for 30 days, and some software support, and if the support window was closed (30 days) it was $30 per incident. That support window handled most software issues, and most hardware issues. I felt kind of scummy doing it, so when I was laid off, I was happy. I'm pretty sure it the outsourcing went to some place overseas. I recall once billing for some software support to the tune of $120.00. The software itself was installed improperly - which was the cause of the problem. (Don't mix Office and MS Works.) This was circa 2001, and after that experience I learned - NEVER get a Dell.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[Martin Blank]

Do you know how many thousands of corporations there are in California alone? How would we gather the necessary knowledge? What's to keep someone rich from funding a campaign to highlight some minimal yet slightly gray conduct of a much smaller competitor in order to force their dissolution?

That kind of thing is much better handled by the system in place now.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[GaratNW]

Well.. where do you draw the line for defining murder? If you're driving a Ford pickup, and it randomly explodes due to a fuel line problem, and it kills you. Your family will probably get a lot of money from that. Then they have a recall because it's killed 200 people over 3 years. That ranks up there with the worst serial killers of all time. They'll walk away with a lot of cash settlements, a product recall and a lot of PR work to do. And then they'll probably have the same thing happen 15 years later. No, I'm not citing a specific example, but car recalls like this have occurred. Most of those companies are still steamrolling ahead. By that view, if you want to commit murder, creating a faulty product that kills people is certainly the best way to get away with it.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[morgan_greywolf]

I'm pretty sure it the outsourcing went to some place overseas. I recall once billing for some software support to the tune of $120.00

No. My step-son used to work there as well (laid off within the last 6 months or so), so I can say with confidence that Stream still does support outsourcing for Dell, and they still pull shit like this.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[Jimmy_B]

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.

Sounds great in theory, but would be terribly destructive; the actions of a few bad apples could cost thousands of people their jobs. A better solution is to replace the corporation's government; make all outstanding shares non-voting (thus stripping the board and the investors of their power) and hold an election for company CEO, with the old board ineligible and low-level employees making up most of the vote.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[Teilo]

By that view, if you want to commit murder, creating a faulty product that kills people is certainly the best way to get away with it. Yes, except for one not-so-minor requirement of law called mens rea . In other words, to use your example, in order to charge someone with murder, they actually had to have the intent to commit murder.

If you believe that Ford motor company has the intent to commit murder, you are welcome to your opinion, however illogical it may be.

And I thought I was a conspiracy theorist.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[quanticle]

Martha Stewart was not incarcerated for anything that her corporation did. She was incarcerated for lying under oath regarding a completely different company - ImClone. In the ImClone case she wasn't an officer of the company, but a mere shareholder who traded illegally based on insider information.

Dell guy quoteth:

[Applekid]

"Dude, you're getting a fine!"

Not my experience

[TomRK1089]

Personally I've not experienced these practices the article speaks of. My video card died on my Latitude D630 about a month ago, and it took me all of 30 minutes to speak with a technical support staffer on the Dell website and schedule someone to come out the next day. Maybe this is a case of "you get what you pay for," since I've got the next-day service contract -- maybe people with lesser maintenance contracts and whatnot get the runaround. Just my perspective.

Re:Not my experience

[Oxy the moron]

You also have the "higher-class" business line in the Latitude and not the "lower-class" lines such as the Inspiron or the Vostro. My experience has shown that just this small difference in PC selection can make a huge difference in quality of service.

Good.

[Xest]

They deserve a kicking in the courts, it took me 3months for them to repair my laptop properly - it went back 3 times and came back still broken 3 times and took 6 months to resolve the issue once and for all. The issue was a knackered graphics card, display corruption as soon as you boot up even on an external device although after they "fixed" it the second time it came back with the same corruption and after 5mins died completely and failed to boot at all at which point their tech support before offering to repair it properly ran me through a series of diagnostics and intelligent questions like "What is the error message". Quite what error message he was expecting from a laptop which I quite clearly explained initially had display corruption (although explaining "display corruption" to someone who doesn't natively speak English in a call centre is hard enough and shouldn't be something I have to do) preventing viewing of any error if there was one to start with followed by not even powering on at all by the time I called them I've no idea, but then, that's Dell.

In the end they decided to just replace it, told me to send the old one back when the new one was delivered but the courier guy said he only had a drop off.

I phoned Dell 3 times over the next 6 months to collect it and they told me the courier would be there on certain days yet never arrived yet I've never once had a courier let me down here despite using them like once or twice a week for the last 8 years so it was blatantly them not organising it.

After that period Dell decided to threaten me for not letting them have the laptop back by charging my card used for the original purchase 2 years prior for the new laptop despite me making every attempt to get it back to them and them not actually being arsed to properly arrange to collect it. When it came to it cost me a sizeable amount of cash in phone bills, hours on the phone trying to sort it out,

Worst company EVER. It's just a shame they didn't get a harder kicking than this. They used to be awesome, now I wouldn't touch them ever again no matter how able they are to improve because I went in to their service buying the laptop when they were still half-decent and watch them devolve into sheer incompetence and worthlessness over the next few years at which point as unfortunately needed their assistance as above.

Other practices I've noticed they used not mentioned here in the UK is they advertise really good offers on some hardware but when you phone up to purchase it when it's a phone only offer they say the offer doesn't really exist and try and sell you it for up to £100 more, I spoke to trading standards and they said they can do this as long as they sell at least some laptops for the offer price, even if that's only to 2 people in a population of 60 million despite blatantly infering that the offer is open to everyone until the end of the offer data.

All that said, I'm not sure there's really a better option out there for things like laptops either - all the major tech companies seem just as bad.

I hope the 'next day on site' counts...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

... I paid a fair chunk of change to get next-day on site support. When I needed it, what it really meant was "they'll schedule with their subcontractor by the next day". Which in turn became, "The subcontractor schedules with their own subcontractor". Which added up to 7 days.

Which car company do you work for?

[Weaselmancer]

A major one.