A list of what’s wrong with Dell technical and customer support.
- Hold times. If every call I make to you bastards has a “longer than average” wait time, guess what that means: it’s not “longer than average” anymore, it’s average. And that average is creeping past a half-hour wait for technical support. Now, a show of hands: how many people do you know who can afford to take a half-hour out of the work day just being on hold, never mind trying to solve the actual problem?
- Misdirection. I have an MP3 player that needs to be replaced. I entered my personal Express Service Code into your stupid phone system. So why have you put me in every support queue EXCEPT the one for MP3s? I don’t have a desktop system or a laptop, and every time your stupid system makes that mistake, they have to kick me into another queue, meaning another half-hour wait.
- Over-compartmentalization. “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do that for you from my department. Here, I’ll transfer you over to another one.” This has happened at least once every time I’ve called (see above); it’s happened twice on a number of occasions.
- Simply not being there. If your return get screwed up for whatever reason (”Hi Purolator, I hate your fucking guts. Signed, Wesley”) you have to call their returns hotline to fix the situation. Do you know what the returns hotline sends you to? AN ANSWERING MACHINE. What the fuck is wrong with you? An answering machine? EVEN WHEN YOUR FUCKING MESSAGE SAYS YOU’RE OPEN FOR BUSINESS BUT LEAVE A GODDAMNED MESSAGE ANYWAYS AND WE’LL GET BACK TO YOU IN ONE BUSINESS DAY?
- Lying. They didn’t get back to me in one business day.
- Losing stuff. When I first ordered this MP3 player, they lost my initial order and I had to buy it again. When I returned my first MP3 player (the hard drive died), they lost the replacement order and I had to wait a month to find out some idiot didn’t key in the order. When my second MP3 player died, I found that the same idiot typed in my service tag wrong, meaning I had to wait another month until Dell finally added a number to it to reflect what’s on the back of my player, a process that apparently requires head office approval. Why so much stuff just keeps getting lost or screwed up, I don’t know.
- Hold times. Yes, again. I’ve been on the phone for an hour today. Over the past 47 days, I’ve spent probably six or seven hours on the phone in total, five of those on hold. And in that time, I still have nothing but a broken MP3 player.
So, in short, not only will I never, ever buy anything from Dell again, and not only will I dissuade people from buying anything from Dell, but I will break anything made by Dell that someone else owns, just so they too can experience the joys of your shitty customer service. If islamocryptosuperfascist terrorist superheroes ever attack America, I want the Dell offices at the top of the list.
Piece of shit motherfuckers.
[...] The cynic in me thinks this is a bad idea. Apple is opening a pandora’s box by officially supporting a tool that puts Windows on your Mac; what about the legions of home users who want Windows, install it, and find things that go wrong? Will they call Apple tech support? And what happens when Apple tells them they can’t do anything? Can you imagine if you called Dell and asked for help with Windows, and they told you to shove off? (well, actually, I wouldn’t put it past Dell to fuck over their customers, but that’s another story.) If Boot Camp was an unsupported tool, or at least not packaged with the next OS X release, Apple would have some breathing room, and I think they’re going to need it. [...]
Pingback by chrominance » XP on Mac—officially — April 5, 2006 @ 12:39 pm
dell is fucked up, you cannot even buy from them
Comment by tom brown — November 5, 2006 @ 5:22 pm
On the 29th of November, ‘06, I helped my ex-wife and my ex-sister-in-law to buy a couple of Dell machines, a laptop and a desktop, one for each. After two days configuring machines at Dell website, in order to adjust the budget (which is cheap, so I had to make the most of it) I spent almost one hour with the sales guy on the phone (this is Colombia, and none of them had credit cards, so we went for cash in hand, instead). First surprise: the configuration tool at Dell’s website does not reflect the real world. You can add as many things you want, but the tool is not prepared to say “if you put this, you have to take that out”. Well, compatibility problems are not what you would expect in this kind of deal, otherwise Dell would not be such a huge company, I thought. I got a little upset, but then, no good would come from insulting the sales guy. I had to make the changes “on the fly” (thanks to 20 years assembling bloody computer parts) and I got a decent deal of machines, if not very upgradeable, because the parts that I threw away compromised future upgrades. The guy (Mr. Fabio Flores) said that he would send an e-mail to each one of them with instructions about how to make the payment. At that point, I left them because the bank was not my concern, assembling the machines according their needs and budget was my job, and a hell of a job well done. But there was something slightly surreal about the instructions: they should scan the bank receipt concerning the money transfer, and send by e-mail to him, so he could confirm that they had paid. They did everything as instructed, and that same day, the money was already on Dell’s hands. Mr. Flores (which I came to know later, was located at a Dell Call Center in Panama) said if there was a problem, he would let them know. On the 4th of December (5 days later), he sent an e-mail saying that he could not order the computers because “the bank receipt they sent is not proof of payment, what is needed is a letter from the bank indicating the transfer succeeded”. At their bank, the manager said he could try to get such letter, but could not give any guarantee that Dell’s bank received the money. He could only guarantee that the money left the accounts. It took 3 days to get the letter, and then, at Dell, they said they could not accept such letter. I was, then, aware of the situation, and I kept thinking: “this is bloody ridiculous, they are a computer company, they *MUST* have some sort of system that controls everything, from the manufacturing plants to the CEO coffee machine”. After 8 days, they had no money anymore, no computers, and no solution. And I was wrong. Dell is a crap company, I started searching with Google, and – voilà – there is an awful load of people that simply *HATE* Dell. My ex-wife is a hotheaded woman, and started calling Dell. I think they deserve her rage, and boy, they will suffer with her. They are a bunch of incompetents, they cannot communicate internally with each other (she said that after being transferred from desk to desk during the phone calls, she had to tell the bloody whole story again to each of them, she knows it by heart now), and they have no means to verify their own bank accounts and cross check the customer’s information. They kept giving excuses, like “this bank account is no good” (because they had 2 bank accounts listed in the e-mail they sent – why 2 banks if one of them is no god?), or “a money transfer is no good, should have been a deposit” (why would they instruct a money transfer in the e-mail if they cannot accept it? Would it be some kind of joke? “Ha, ha, we took your money, now piss off and do it right, your bloody poor 3rd world hispanic woman.”). After that, she decided to go to Dell’s bank, and explained the case to their manager. Even thought he *CANNOT* reveal information about the bank’s clients, after 2 days he decided to help and gave an official document saying the money had arrived at Dell’s account on the same 29th of November, detailed with sender, recipient, amount to the cent, time of the transfer, everything. But Dell likes things complicated, so now they are not receiving the scanned document by e-mail, but instead, they gave a fax number – which plainly *DOES NOT EXIST*!!! And absolutely no-one at Dell can explain either why they are not receiving the e-mail anymore or what the correct fax number is. It has been 2 weeks since Dell stole their money, 2 weeks since Dell has their money in the bank account, with all the rates of interest, and until now, there is no bloody computer, no purchase order, nothing. Tomorrow they will visit a lawyer, to see if they can sue Dell. I suspect Dell is not a company at all, but an intergalactic mistake. Some alien race, after hiding for some time on Earth in order to avoid the paparazzi due to an embarrassing freak accident whit an anteater, left behind a portable black hole, which was discovered by the U.S. military. They built a factory to conceal it, and now they experiment with it, searching for new and bizarre weapons, like the one that forces the enemies to call a Customer Center and put them on hold forever, while the power of the black hole sucks their brains through the phone cord and drives them mad. It is the only explanation. Behold, the truth is out there, somewhere, but the Big Brother is always watching it. Abandon all your hopes.
Comment by Giuseppi Garibaldi — December 12, 2006 @ 10:44 pm
computers just suck. they are a poor excuse for a secondary source. people are smarter than computers
Comment by gary — March 20, 2007 @ 5:27 pm
If i type in a specific thing, the fucking computer gives me some other shit.
Comment by Don Raymond — March 20, 2007 @ 5:30 pm