What has happened to Dell’s customer service?
I normally don’t like to post things like this, but I’m fresh off the phone and freshly aggravated. This is not the first time with this kind of thing with Dell for me either.
In November of 2009, I assisted my best client in purchasing an extended warranty for their office desktop. It wasn’t cheap – I don’t remember the exact cost but it was in the 200-300 range. We purchased the Dell ProSupport for IT – basically, when you have an IT guy (me) already, I do the troubleshooting and call Dell and tell them “Hey, the DVD drive is busted” or whatever the issue is, and they send out the part and a tech to fix it. This particular computer is about 250 miles away at a weekend home, so it’s not exactly practical for me to visit in person.
Today is what, 8 months later? For some reason, they never updated the service contract on the service tag, so after explaining this in online chat, I provided the order number for the warranty renewal we purchased. The rep then said “Unfortunately, because it doesn’t reflect on the service tag yet, you’ve reached the basic workstation dept. I’ll need to transfer you.”
Great. Generally the word “transfer”, especially with Dell, means being sent to the wrong place after long hold times, only to get someone who has no clue who you are. In another life, I worked various phone support roles. We weren’t allowed to “blind transfer” people – we had to stay on the line until we got through, and expain everything to the next rep.
So, after 45 minutes of staring at a screen saying “You are next in the queue” and not getting my session picked up, I decided to call.
After punching in the express service code, and giving the rep all of my information, again it’s “Oh you don’t have that type of warranty”. I explained the story, again, and provided the order number (twice, bit of a language barrier it would seem…) to be told “Oh, you need to be transferred”. I asked him if he had updated the records showing I had the correct warranty, so I wouldn’t keep going through this. He explained I’d need to call back during business hours and speak to customer service to resolve that. I asked him “Well, instead of just passing the buck, or making me do it since I’ve already paid for it, why don’t you handle it?” He explained “Oh, well they are closed now.” to which I responded “OK, so make yourself a note and take care of it tomorrow while they’re open”.
This is one of the things I find everywhere – nobody seems willing to help the customer if is at all outside of their normal duties. I can’t imagine telling one of my customers “Yes, well I sold you this, but I can’t help you – you’ll have to call back and speak to somebody else”. We’d be out of business.
We used to have a saying in a call center I worked at, that our job as representatives made us better customers for one – we didn’t unnecessarily give people on the other end a hard time, but secondly, you had better give us good customer support, because when you do it for a living, you don’t tolerate poor customer service.
Get it together, Dell. I don’t have to keep buying your hardware.