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?

[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?

[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.

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!

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.

[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.

[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: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.

Which car company do you work for?

[Weaselmancer]

A major one.