09.09.09

Horrendous service from Dell

Posted in Colen Stuff at 1:47 pm by Colen

For a long time I’ve heard good things about Dell, and about their customer service for business machines. Assuming you paid a bit extra to skip the basic “people who can’t speak English” level of support, they would take care of whatever problems you had with stuff.

Based on this good track record, Management and I have bought a lot of stuff (laptops etc) from Dell over the last few years. We had the chance to put their service to the test recently when Management damaged his laptop – which happens to be his main development machine – on a flight back from Indianapolis. No problem – the level of support he paid for meant that Dell should have sent out a tech the next business day to fix the laptop. Great.

However, because of the circumstances of the incident (the bag the laptop was in fell over), Dell required that the laptop be sent to their central depot for repair. This was to make sure the damage really was accidental – apparently their techs are incapable of working this out themselves? Whatever – Dell said it usually took a week or two to fix the laptop and send it back, which was ok, he had stuff to do for that time and could use an old machine instead.

Management sent his laptop off, in a box that Dell supplied, with 2-day Fedex shipping. 7 days later, the laptop arrived (thanks Fedex). Then, the box sat around for a week in Dell’s depot without even being opened. This took them up until Friday – 2 weeks after he sent it off. Don’t worry, said the Dell phone support – it only takes them 1-2 days to fix something once they open it, and we’ll overnight it back to you once it’s finished. We’ll call you on Tuesday to let you know what’s happening. Fine, that’ll be great.

No phone call on Tuesday. Management calls up again – apparently the laptop needs a new video card, but they don’t have any! And said video cards won’t be in stock again for several weeks! So not only have you been sans laptop for almost a month, you’re not getting it back for another few weeks, until a new shipment of video cards arrives on the boat from Taiwan or wherever!

But don’t worry – we’ll fix you up with a refurbished laptop and stick your hard disk into it so you can get back to work. It’ll only take, oh, about 2 weeks to build it and then ship it off to you. So don’t worry, you’ll have [b]a[/b] laptop back in a couple of weeks time.

tl;dr: Appalling service from Dell leaves Management without his laptop for over a month. Chances of me buying further computers from Dell approach zero. I guess I might as well just buy a cheap Acer machine or something if I need one – and if my current laptop goes wrong, tell dell it “just stopped working” in case they give me the runaround like this.

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