An evening of confusion with Dell customer service

I got my Dell Mini10V in the mail yesterday. It's small and red and pretty, but I had one minor issue with my order. When I was personalizing my order online, it asked me if I wanted a 24WHr 3-cell battery or a 56WhHr 6-cell battery; the 6-cell was just $35 more, but had double the lifespan. I went with the 6-cell. As soon as I pulled it out of the box, though, I realized it was way too big to fit into my favorite bag. It was my fault; I had ordered the wrong thing. I called Dell's 1-800 number to see if they could process an exchange; it was the beginning of what turned out to be a baffling journey into the labyrinth of Dell's customer service phone line. After a few minutes of hold music, I got through to a woman who told me I could return the 6-cell, get a refund, and then purchase the 3-cell separately. I wanted to ask her how much the refund would be for, but after telling me she'd email me a UPS label, she hastily thanked me for choosing Dell and then put me on hold so I could speak to a sales rep who would then sell me the 3-cell battery. The sales rep was a soft-spoken woman named Jame. After asking me about three minutes of questions about what kind of laptop I had purchased and how, she told me I could buy a 3-cell battery for my Mini 10V for $129.99 + tax, how would I like to pay? Before I paid, I wanted to know how much I was going to get refunded for the 6-cell. She said it would be around $135, but she seemed unsure. I asked her to put me back on the phone with the person whom I had talked to about the refund so I could double check. She refused. "I'd really like to sell you this battery first," she said. I explained that I didn't want to pay $129.99+ for an extra battery for a $299 computer without knowing how much I'll get refunded for the one I was returning. She kept asking me why I wasn't buying the battery from her, and I repeatedly told her that it was because I wanted to confirm the return amount, and besides, I can buy it on Dell.com for the same price, free shipping, without spelling out my name, address, and credit card number over and over. Finally, she said: "Ma'am, I didn't want it to come to this, but I'll tell you this, I want to make this sale. If you don't buy the battery, I won't get my commission." "I understand," I said, politely at first. "But I really don't want to spend that much money without knowing how much I'll be refunded." "I told you, you'll get about $135." "Can you please just put me through to the returns person?" "But then I won't get my commission," she said, refusing to hang up. "That's really not my problem. Can you please just do your job and put me through to the returns department?" "I am doing my job. My job is to sell you this battery." "I'm not going to buy it now. Since you can't answer my question about the refund, I need to talk to the person I was talking to right before you, who might be able to." "Then is it okay if I call you in 15 minutes to sell you this battery again?" "Ok, fine, call me back later," I said. The hold music again. A few minutes later, someone picked up, thanked me for calling Dell, and asked me for some information so that he could connect me to the right person. Two people later, I finally got an answer — I would get $35 for returning the 6-cell battery that retails for $149.99. "But someone just tried to sell me the 3-cell for $129 and told me I'd get $135 back for the 6-cell," I said. This woman had no idea what I was talking about, so she put me back on hold. To be fair, I rarely have a good experience calling toll-free customer service numbers for any company. But in the hour and a half that I spent on the phone with Dell, I spoke to about ten different people, listened to an hour of hold music, repeated my customer number, my order number, my address, my return authorization number, my purchase ID number, my phone number, and my computer's service tag number at least two dozen times total, and spelled out my name another dozen times. I got blackmailed into staying the phone with one person eager to make a sale and was commanded to get off of my headset (I'm not kidding — one guy literally yelled at me to get off my headset because he couldn't hear me) by another. At the end of the day, I was left with no idea whether I could exchange my 6-cell for a 3-cell and a conviction that these Dell customer service reps must be unhappy, untrained, underpaid, or all of the above. (I should also point out that I probably never would have encountered this giant battery issue in the first place if the Dell web site made it clear how big and how heavy the 6-cell would be — I mean, I knew it would stick out, but there was no image or metric given to gauge how much with.) I talked to a Dell spokesperson this morning, who explained to me that the battery can't be broken out of the system and returned or exchanged separately.* "It's part of the components in the system, like the processor, the memory, and the OS; once you receive your system, you can't pull those parts out. Your options are to return the whole thing or to buy a new battery." But of course! This made perfect sense. What didn't make sense was the wild goose chase that customer service sent me on last night. *She also said they would use this incident as an opportunity to retrain their service reps, and that it has never been their intention to mislead their customers. Photos: Disaster Area (Thumbnail) and Ndevil (Mini 10 battery)

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1. You ordered the wrong thing, and they told you that you had to return the wrong thing to get the right thing – that’s the story? What a complete waste of column inches.

   Sounds to me like you got one person who was trying to be as efficient as possible, but who apparently didn’t realize that wasn’t the correct procedure. Then you got a pushy salesperson, who should have known better. But it hardly rises to “disaster” level, and doesn’t really deserve the attention you’ve just given it.

   1. Do you really think that this is acceptable customer service? I accidentally ordered the wrong thing from Amazon, and the same day that I realized my mistake, I sent it back and got my refund a few days later, minus a few bucks for shipping (because it was my fault). I’ve had similarly smooth return/exchange experiences with Apple. Dell has no excuse.

   2. No. She ordered the wrong thing and called to ask what to do. Instead of making clear that she should return the entire laptop, not just the battery, they put her through to a salesperson. This salesperson played along with Lisa’s misapprehension — that she could be refunded about $135 for just the 6-cell battery — to try and close the the sale on a product lisa couldn’t possibly need given Dell’s actual returns policy.

   3. To be fair, Dell does a poor job of showing the size difference between their batteries. A while ago I purchased a Dell Latitude notebook for an employee and got the larger battery. When the notebook arrived, the battery was a giant eyesore that stuck out in the front of the notebook. It was almost like a wrist rest for the keyboard. My recommendation now is to go a retail store so you can see exactly what you are buying.

   4. If you think this was a waste of space, it helps to remember that the internet is effectively infinite and there are much stupider things on it.

   5. That’s the problem with poorly designed customer service departments that connect you with a “salesperson”. Where I work, the tech service guys handle ordering since it’s a pretty simple thing to do. There’s no sales quotas (your product and marketing departments should be able to so all the selling you need) or call metrics. People get helped, problems get solved.

      I guess a company (Dell) that charges you extra to speak to someone in the US when you call them probably isn’t too worried about the “solved” part though.

2. You found it a waste of space and yet spend even more of your valuable time to bitch about it and then further comment. So it must have been worth something, especially considering you almost had a cohesive thought at the end.

   Secondly, this is the Internet. Column inches are something that William Randolph Hearst worried about. Use the scroll bar on your right hand side and you’ll notice that this article that offended you so would disappear from your sight, without even having to be read. Further, if this post was so offensive and obvious to you, why did you a) click the “read more” link and b) finish it?

   Thank you for your kindly faked attention.

3. I’m confused, you couldn’t exchange the battery because it can’t be broken out of the system, but they would sell you a different battery to put in? How did they expect you to use it if you couldn’t remove the 6 cell?

   1. tend to agree, why would they sell you one separately if you couldn’t change it?

4. @weatherman – you’re right, but it does illustrate the mindboggling path one has to take to get even the simplest information out of Dell, and the fact that few people there actually know something.

   I spent two hours this morning on the phone to Dell Belgium. My laptop arrived (Alienware M17x with all the pr0n money can buy) but the keyboard layout was not the one I ordered.

   Now I know the difference between “US QWERTY” and “US-International QWERTY” is not obvious for lay people, but having to explain this to various Dell support staff was a bit surprising – especially the Belgium ones who deal with a good 8-10 types of keyboard layouts on a regular basis.

   The end? Nobody knows what this keyboard is, even though it’s printed on my invoice. However, I do have the luxury of having an invoice, and simply not paying it is my only angle. Once they see it has not been paid for a couple of months they tend to get more helpful ;-)

5. I have a lovely Apple. They’re very sweet people.

   I hate Dell, with a vengeance. They sold my wife a Vista laptop that couldn’t function if you gave it a lollipop – inadequate on-board memory to run Vista. They join Samsung in my pantheon of “I shall never buy from you”. “Ever again, just on principle”.

   The point of the article is to highlight awful customer service, and the capitulation of the phone rep to the commission monster, indicating that she never intended anything else.

   Having said which, I recommend to you LK assertion training. Some of these people need positive and firm guidance to deliver what it is you fairly need.

   Good on you for this post.

   1. I have a lovely Apple. They’re very sweet people.
      Yeah cos apple has a clean track record and everything.

      A v. quick google turns up these results:
      (I saved the best for last – ‘Apple Store Manager Calls Autistic Guy A “Freak”‘)

      http://www.sme-blog.com/comments/apple-the-customer-support-nightmare-part-ii-the-criminal-investigation

      http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-437178.html

      http://www.complaints.com/2009/august/3/apple_customer_service_211342.htm

      http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2149516&tstart=0

      http://consumerist.com/5162241/apple-cosmetic-damage-keeps-us-from-replacing-your-battery

      http://consumerist.com/5091447/apple-repair-center-doesnt-repair-your-laptop-but-does-replace-your-keyboard-with-german-layout

      http://consumerist.com/5022528/apple-sorry-we-wrote-on-your-macbook-screen-with-pen-and-then-lost-it-heres-a-new-laptop

      http://consumerist.com/358985/dear-apple-my-macbook-keeps-trying-to-light-my-house-on-fire-please-replace-it

      http://consumerist.com/351092/apple-store-manager-calls-autistic-guy-a-freak

      It’s funny how whenever there is a post on BB about *any* tech manufacturer f-up (excluding apple) – there are always a bunch of loyal fanboys to tell eveyone how great apple is. This kind of blind support is what makes idiot parrots like the CEO of my company tell me, the company graphic designer, that macs are better. Meanwhile he has me working on an XP machine.

      I concede that Apple does make nice computers and clean, efficient software – but their business practices need a MAJOR revamp. Their lawyers need to be lined up and shot. The fact that they have taken measures to render jailbreaking a phone illegal shows that they are overstepping their boundary. If I buy a car, can the manufacturer tell me not to put a super charger on it? FUCK NO. Would I have to understand their “IP” (the engine design) in order to install the super charger? YES. How is this case any different to jailbreaking?

      Apple is getting all too smug about their increasing market share to a point where they are no longer giving a shit about their customers.

6. Solution: keep the big battery. You will be glad you have it when you see how long it lasts compared with the 3-cell. Meanwhile, go to Ebay, buy a new 3-cell battery for about $65. Everyone wins, except Dell (which is as it should be in this case), and you can still use your new computer while you’re waiting for the battery to come.

7. By the way, plus points to the second person for telling you the truth about why she was pushing, and negative points to the first for dumping you as soon as possible without solving the problem completely.

   1. No, zero kudos to Jame for telling Lisa that she was on commission. Jame had been told multiple times what the customer wanted, and refused to do it. Refused! And she straight out lied to Lisa, both about being able to get money back, and the amount of money that she would get back. Imagine going to a car dealership where the salesman blocks the door and tells you you’re not checking with the bank until after you buy a car, then assures you that you’ll get the bank loan at a super interest rate. It doesn’t even make sense.

      Maybe we’re just too used to pushy, functionally deaf salespeople to recognize this as really, really bad customer service. If I have to tell someone three times that I’m not interested in buying credit card insurance, they’d better not complain when I hang up on them.

8. I think this is God’s way of telling you to buy a new bag.

9. HP is not better.

10. Welcome to the wonderful world of proprietary dell batteries lolz.. They were right in not letting you return the battery you have now.. Who knows with the cruddy support services you got.. The one they would of shipped you either wouldn’t work due to wrong id #s etc or wrong model wouldn’t fit..

11. The best solution at this point is to cut your losses, accept that that time you wasted on the phone is gone forever, return the machine for a full refund (with your explanation of why you returned it) and never buy from Dell again. If enough people do this, they’ll maybe get the hint.

12. Cngrtltns – y jst gt smn frd drng th rcssn by sltng Dll’s cstmr srvc n th bss f yr ntrctn wth ths ndvdl. Wk p t yr rspnsblts hr n bng bng’s frntpg – thr’s mr t stk hr thn th ncnvnnc f yr nw lptp nt fttng nt yr fvrt bg.

    Wrkng n sls n cmmssn s dffclt nd dsprtng – smtms y nd cmmssn t bdly bcs y nd t py th rnt r bll nd tht lds t pshynss. Sls rps gnrlly dn’t lk bng pshy bcs thy knw tht t’s bd fr sls – thr s dsprtn hr. Y cld hv hng p t ny tm nd smply rdld th cstmr srvc nmbr tht y rng n th frst plc. Y’r mrlly nttld s cstmr t try nd gt srtd t bt y’r nt mrlly nttld t ngnr th pssbl cnsqncs f ths rtcl. Thr s ls th qstn f hw y yrslf r cshng n by sng ths ncdnt fr n rtcl. Dd y mk sr tht y gt cmmssn n th sl?

    1. You’re right. Lisa should be deeply ashamed for expecting good customer service during a recession. Everyone should know that in this economic clime, its acceptable to do your job poorly.

    2. Know what? Then don’t work a commission job.

       A lot of times it’s an initial greed that gets people into it in the first place. “You could be making $500,000 a year!” That DOES sound nice!!

       It’s the employment equivalent of playing slot machines. Eventually more people than not lose out. Sure the company may have a few people pulling in a lot of commission, but they’re also bringing in business. Plus you have all of the money you saved on everyone else to offset it.

       I’ve turned down jobs, walked out never to return when I didn’t care for the final pay structure. It’s not a negotiating point. It’s my mortgage.

       To paraphrase Mr Pink; If you don’t like it, learn to fucking type.

    3. Yes, it’s a well known fact that Dell executives spend most of their time searching online comment boards for complaints from customers, then run sophisticated computer algorithms to figure out (from the scant information provided) the identities of the offenders. After having fired them, they call up all their executive buddies at various other companies and blacklist the villains, thereby ensuring they will never, ever, work in this country again, even at McDonalds. Having crushed all hope of gainful employment for those who dared to give shitty customer service, they wait until the former employee’s house is foreclosed, then swoop in and buy it for a song. You see, Dell is not really a computer company; that business unit merely provides a vehicle for acquiring dirt-cheap real estate.

       It’s true, it was on 60 Minutes last night.

    4. @Sef: I work in sales, entirely on commission. I do not find it dispiriting or difficult, but that may be because I’ve never had trouble focusing on my customer rather than my pay. Most customer experiences would be utter crap if the person they were talking to was focused more on their pay than them, regardless if they were getting paid salary/hourly/commission. Furthermore, commission sales has much more justice to it than most areas–you get paid and promoted as a direct result of value produced, not your inner-office political savvy or any other extraneous factor.

       And it swings both ways: The lessons can seem harsh, but killing a battery sale is one thing, making a customer mad is another. Unhappy customers almost ALWAYS cause collateral damage beyond their own buying decisions, and that is the biggest reason why companies make customer service a priority.

    5. If she’s not doing the job, that’s not the customer’s fault – that’s her fault. Suck it up.

13. Solution? Return the whole computer, wait two days, order another one.

    If you have a Dell problem, use their online help forums and trees. DON’T attempt to call them.

    1. As some one who worked for that company (I’m a little afraid of saying that although I worked in their corporate headquarters and not in sales/CS) I can vouch that this is the best method. Return the whole thing. Get the money back. Buy what you want as an entire package. Either that or cruise the internet for the battery you want and keep the large one for backup (or sell it online).

       To me the only real mistake here is that the first rep didn’t explain the rules to you. After that it’s easy to get lost in a chain of confusion as more people step in who don’t understand what’s going on. Online services are a lot better than the phone reps though. It used to be funny listening to people in our office losing their heads with our own customer service reps.

       Oh man… I hope I don’t get sued for saying that. All in all it was not a bad company to work for, at least the department in which I worked. No… really… I mean that!

14. http://www.radley.co.uk/Search.aspx?SearchKeyword=laptop

    Ouch – some people here are really mad. I never get that mad.

15. After reading this I don’t think I’ll want a Dell computer. How much money was wasted on a simple problem? 10 people and and over an hour? Those employees might cost Dell over $50 an hour. Dell would have been better off freely mailing you the smaller battery.

    Some companies know how to do this right. Last week I made a mistake with some tools I ordered from a company called Enco. It resulted in their customer service person contacting me. They mailed the missing tools, dropping shipping charges and applying my 10% discount from the first orders coupon. Both packages arrived the same day and it only took 5 minutes.

16. @weatherman Seriously? You’re bitching that you had to read a column about Ms. Katayama’s disastrous Dell customer service experperience? If you don’t like it, don’t read it! That’s the beauty about CHOICE! Geez, get a life!

17. This isn’t the worst Dell has done – not even close.

    I ordered a laptop from them this summer to use at university. First they delayed the shipment several months without explaining why – it took several hours on the phone to find out this was because they were fresh out of the hard drive I had wanted (not an uncommon hard drive, by the way – 500gb with motion sensor). Once I actually got the computer, after about a month the whole thing died. I had warranty, which had been pricey, so I asked to have it fixed. They sent repair person after repair person, forcing me to spend hours on the phone and hours waiting on the repair people (I ended up seeing three or four on this issue alone) with no progress whatsoever. Finally they decided we should sent the PC to them. (Keep in mind, I ordered the PC at the beginning of summer. It was now a few weeks into the college semester.) It took hours to convince them to send a stinking replacement instead of forcing us to trust their (obviously incompetent) repair service.
    So yeah, I don’t think I’d recommend being a Dell customer.

18. To provide a counter-article, I’ve always had excellent luck with Dell tech support. Admittedly this is a different branch than Dell customer service, but after several Dell related incidents in the last few years (due to random power failures and ineffective surge protectors), each time I called up, was treated like a decent human being, was quickly upgraded to an intelligent human being, and within 10 minutes of describing what had been tried, and performing additional tests at Dell’s behest, had a repairman dispatched with all the spare parts in the world to make the systems work again. This even happened with an out-of-warranty box, which rather amazed me, since many companies (Apple, HP, Acer, etc.) won’t even give you the time of day without a warranty, and will spend longer explaining this to you than it would take to answer your question.

    As I’ve never had this kind of luck with other tech companies, including the much vaunted Apple (which generally treats me like a moron whenever something goes wrong with their hardware, and then finds an inane reason not to honor their warranty), I tend to think Dell’s worth sticking with for regular purchases.

19. OHMYGAWD with the name spelling at Dell. That’s the part I identified with in this post: the spelling things out, over and over.

    I have accepted that, for price considerations, customer service at Dell has long since been outsourced to India. It’s nothing I’m happy about, in the sense that I hate knowing how many people in the US could use those jobs. But I understand the cost issue. I will even say that the stereotype of the Indian customer service representative with uneven English is outdated and mean-spirited–virtually all of the Dell reps I have spoken with speak very good English.

    HOWEVER, it is appalling that Dell can’t find some kind of training program to assist reps in taking down the names of people, streets, and cities. Probably 40% of each phone call I have had with them has been spent repeatedly spelling out who I am and where I live. Even using words to assist (“A as in apple,” “S as in Sam”) does not help at all.

    Even the best educated tech service people with the best language skills can hardly be expected to excel at spelling proper nouns from half a world away without some assistance. They need some kind of system. It’s mind-numbing to have to deal with.

20. Dell costumer service is hell with a voice. But it is a computer company and should know what is going on when it comes to their product. If some one looses their job because the try to hard sell some thing as little as a battery so be it too bad so sad; they should have been helpful and not act like a used car salesmen.

    Is it just me or are the trolls thick this morning?

21. Returning a battery shouldn’t take over an hour and a salesperson shouldn’t be demanding that a customer give them a commission. Crappy service.

22. This is the reason why I built my most recent desktop computer after being very happy with Dell’s quality on my last one. But reports of noisy computers, poor design and frequent customer service complaints soured me on the company. Granted, you can’t build your own laptop so you’re at the mercy of the vendor you choose.

23. “Ma’am, I didn’t want it to come to this, but I’ll tell you this, I want to make this sale. If you don’t buy the battery, I won’t get my commission.”

    The second she put herself before you she should have been hearing dial tone. The best part about sales is you can always call back and talk to someone else (or a manager).

24. idk how big of a problem it is for you, but why not get a bigger bag? You will be getting a better battery in the end anyways. If for some reason it would be an issue, I understand why you want to exchange it.

    Either way horrible customer service by Dell.

25. I’ll 2nd the decent Dell tech support. Not sure if the brains drain away when you get to the sales division,vut I had a great experience with Dell support. My mini 9 had a stuck shift key. I did all the savy things (reseated they keyboard, shot compressed air all over the thing) all to no avail. Told this to the tech, and the tech acted like a human being and went off-script. I wasn’t asked to reboot, I wasn’t asked to reseat the keyboard or any of the other things I’ve already done. Instead they just sent me a replacement, free of charge, on 2nd day air delivery.

26. Having been on the other side of the phone, doing tech support for Apple, I can understand your frustration 100%! You have good agents, and bad ones. And it sounds like you were just unlucky enough to get a lot of bad ones in a row.

    The nice thing about Apple tech support reps, they can make sales directly for a customer without any transfers. Yes, they are given bonuses on how many sales they can make, but to be honest, I found that I would offer to help the person make the sale if it became obvious that they wanted or needed something, but the second they said no, I stopped selling. By using my low-key, casual sales technique, I was constantly #1 on my team for sales per week.

    So it’s really all about who you get.

27. So, does it cost more to buy stuff over the phone vs. online, since they have to pay a commission to the sales person?

28. After a terrible customer experience with Comcast years ago, I never call any of these lines without a pad handy. I write down the names of everybody I speak to and what they tell me. It makes for a nice (and sometimes comedic) recap when you finally get to talk to somebody in charge.

29. I work for Dell.

    Not that I sell computers, I’m a programmer/DBA who only recently became a Dell employee through acquisition. The reason that they consider the battery as an integral part of the system is that Dell is constantly changes suppliers for all the parts of their non-Latitude lines. By the time they process the return for your old battery they may have stopped selling it, and then they’ll have to eat the difference. They do this in order to get the best return on any system they sell and to get it out the door at the lowest cost to the consumer.

    Contrast this with the Latitude philosophy where they are business laptops usually sold in large numbers to customers who need to be able to repair and refurbish machines and not just throw them out. A Latitude E6500 you buy today will have standardized parts for at least 3 years and will be identical to any other one you buy from them until they change model numbers. An Inspiron you buy Tuesday may have a different screen manufacturer than they one you buy Wednesday.

    I wish Dell you spell this out on their web page, it’s not that difficult for your average consumer to grok. It’s why you pay a premium for the Latitudes and why they come with a 3-year service contract. Instead I had to find out all this while I spent 2 hours on the phone with Dell yesterday just trying to find out if I qualified for a discount as a Dell employee. I wish I could say my experience with the Dell phone maze was totally different and I got treated as the Queen of Sheeba because I work for them but alas…

    1. That honestly sounds like a bad system to me. Companies usually get bulk discounts on the hardware they source, so sticking with one manufacturer (or a small group) means cheaper components. Also, specifications and testing are much easier to nail down when you aren’t constantly changing manufacturers and components.

       When a company sells something, they have a responsibility to support it. If that costs the company money, so be it. Dell has made a business out of reliability and support, and now that’s being lost because they are trying to minimize retail prices? If they want to be the next Acer or eMachines, so be it, but it seems to me they are giving up on what made them a leader.

30. And to show the opposite, I have had fantastic experience with Dell’s Linux customer service. Once I could find it. Truly, once I found the super secret phone number,printed nowhere in the manual, they solved every problem I had (being an ubuntu noob) AND the rep gave me his extention in case I had another problem. I can tell you the last time a customer service rep gave me their extention “just in case” – Never.

31. I can’t say that I’ve ever had a particularly bad experience with Dell(though, since most of my interactions with them are on behalf of a school district that buys Dells by the pallet load, this isn’t a huge surprise, Dell knows where their bread is buttered).

    My Dell experience does leave me with a word of advice, though. Never use the phone, always use the online chat option. You can do all the same things via chat that you can on the phone, without any accent hassles, spelling hassles, with an automatic transcript of the conversation emailed to you, etc, etc. Plus, particularly if you have dual monitors or more than one machine, the chat window can be done in parallel with whatever you actually want to be doing much more easily than a phone call can.

32. The first thing you should do when a Dell computer arrives that you are not satisfied with is call the number for returns and exchanges. Close to two years ago I ordered a refurbished laptop from Dell. Everything was great except for the part where it wouldn’t power on at room temperature (I am cheap with heating and keep the temp at 65 in the winter). I spelled this out to the customer support techs and sent the laptop in for repairs about three times before just exchanging the whole thing for a new unit. The new one works great and coincidently came with a larger battery.

    After that I have used email support almost exclusively. It’s a little slower but the language (accent, on both sides) barrier is next to nonexistent.

33. How terrible. Dell should have sent someone to your house and made the exchange.

34. Yet another reason to get a Mac.

    1. Ha! A paraphrase of my recent conversation with apple tech support:

       Me: X just happened with my computer when doing Y

       Tech support: Wow. That doesn’t happen.

       Me: Well it does now.

       Tech: I don’t know why.

       Me: Do you thnk it could be this?

       Tech: Uh… maybe.

       Me: Ok well I’m going to do XYZ to try and fix it, if that isn’t the problem it will at least help pin it down right?

       Tech: I’ve just never seen this problem before.

       Me: OK. Well I’ll report back to let you know if it worked.

       (Wait… who works where now!?!?)

    2. “Yet another reason to get a Mac.”

       I doubt most people who are buying a Dell are probably A) looking for a PC, and B) not looking to spend $1000 more for a machine than they were intending. The Mini 10V starts at around $280+ while baseline macbooks are over 1K EASY. Another reason not to get a mac, IMO. (and I own a macbook pro and a dell inspiron btw.. i wish i’d saved the money on the mac and bought two more dells instead)

35. @Gary, #3: “You found it a waste of space and…”

    STF, Gry. m s sck f rdng rpls lk ths. weatherman is making a valid complaint that s/he doesn’t want to read let alone even be offered these types of posts IN THE FUTURE. Without negative feedback how the hell are bloggers supposed to know when some posts hit the wrong mark?! Would not commenting suggest the same? Uh, no. Duh. Get a clue.

    As for why someone would click “read more,” well some of us got here and landed on the full post page without having to do that. s ths yr frst dy n th ntrnt? Hv y nt hrd f lnks? Qt bng sch mrn nd kndly kp yr dtc rmrks t yrslf.

    Thank you for stopping in at the jerk store, come again.

    Oh, and Lisa, I liked your column. Granted, I don’t think it is out of the ordinary but I found it light and a reminder about how if one thing is wrong with an order and if the first person cannot fix it, it will take way too long to fix.

    1. Jerkstore,

       You don’t get to talk to our commenters like that, least of all when they are standing up for our bloggers right to publish as they see fit.

       1. Hooray for the Moderator! Flame wars need to be extinguished. I liked the article very much, because I have had that sort of customer service just about every time I’ve called one of those lines.

36. Great Article. But shows how Americans will put up with most anything for a few bucks savings or at least getting their way over a company who they think are wrong (about just about anything).

    I have too many friends who have Dells, Compaqs, HPs, that are either unhappy with them or with their customer service. Being an ex-IBM Service Rep, I have never bought any other than IBM (who’s motto is “IBM Means Service”) and who’s PC division was sold a few years ago to a communist country and have upheld and enforced (I can only imagine how) the idea that their company means customer service.) I have purchased three computers from this communist state and have not only been rewarded with excellent service but with excellent products.

    Just goes to show that Obamas’ coming conversion of America to a communist state won’t be all bad.

    Papa Ray

37. I tried to order a computer from Dell about a year ago… but apparently they had outsourced their sales team to India (at least for Canada). There was some confusion about the credit card (I had just moved, but not updated the address on the card). While the problem was easily fixed with a 5 minute phone call to the credit card company, the sales representative simply did not understand English enough to understand that everything was fixed and to process the order. I tried to explain what was happening, but the sales person was clearly reading from a script, and really didn’t know English beyond what was on the script.

    Not that I am complaining. I appreciate that Dell presented their total lack of concert for customer service up front. Went with another company, and I am totally happy that I did.

38. Man, some of the criticism this article gets is mindboggling.

    Some perspective from the other end of the phone line: I work as a call center agent.

    Not for Dell and not in the US, but in Austria for a cellphone service provider, doing basic tech support, helping people with their bills, changing billing plans etc.

    And an experience like this one is really, really bad. Not something I’d expect somebody to be fired over (Unless it keeps happening.), but at the very least some training and coaching would be in order. Yes, callcenter agents are payed badly (I’m too, but the job is five minutes by foot from where I live and the coworkers and people in charge are nice, which counts for a lot, IMO.) and yes, the job is hard. Customers can be idiots, too.

    But it’s still the job to deliver as good and fast a service as possible! That’s what we are PAYED to do!!! Lying, holding a customer “hostage” and generally being clueless are all failing the job!

    So, yeah, if I had something like that happen to me and I had the chance, writing an angry BB post would be the least I’d do.

39. Due to a bad decision, currently I am doing that very line of work; customer service (should have never moved back to my home town). However, having worked the quality assurance end of the business. I can tell you that the sales units are always held to different standards than the customer service units. The whole system for many companies (not the one I’m at right now) is set up in tiers. AT&T is one good example. When you initially call them for, say, a billing question, you assume that you are going to a customer service team. In fact, the team you actually get is customer sales AND service; the sales portion of their job is actually more important to AT&T (or in the case I know of specifically, their contractor) than the service. At the end of every call (and they are urging you to get there quickly, as talk time has to be maintained at usually less than 5 minutes), they throw in a sales pitch for some service or option. They have to do this EVEN IF THE CALL IS ABOUT MAKING PAYMENT ARRANGEMENTS DUE TO DIFFICULTIES DOING SO. Think about that for a moment; trying to sell to those who can’t afford it.
    In the case of commission jobs, this isn’t just about making extra money, this is more than likely about meeting quota; Jame, while no excuse, may very well have been low on her quota this month and may be facing reprimand. Or possibly termination. You can bet, though, that when their quality assurance monitor listens to that call, she is screwed – she had drawn back the curtain and shown you what was really going on there, but still refused to budge.
    In some areas, customer sales and service jobs are all that is left. Certainly seems the case here in Jacksonville, Florida, and pretty sure that may be the case in parts of Texas (though I’m pretty certain they farm out those jobs as well. She probably didn’t work for Dell per se, but for a contractor).
    Ironically, I read this after getting off the phone with a CSR from Bank of the Northern Hemisphere. Frustrating to say the least.

40. I deal with dell gold support a lot at work. the experience is the exact opposite of the regular dell support. the gold support staff are very well trained and easy to work with.

41. Sounds like a rough time, but I don’t think it’s typical. I ordered a Dell pc a few years ago, which took a couple days longer than they estimated to be built and shipped. I was upset for the inconvenience, and called to complain nicely — just saying it wasn’t what I expect from them, and wasn’t part of the terms of the sale. They ended up working with me to fix my dissatisfaction, and gave me a $200 credit that covered a set of Klipsch 5.1 speakers. If you’re not satisfied, keep working with customer service until they are. Be nice, and focus on the bottom line of what would make the situation right. I also have ordered a Dell notebook that came with a bum DVD drive, which they swapped for me in a process similar to what it would take to fix your problem.

    For something like this, basically say you want to be shipped a new 3-cell and return the old battery in the packaging the new one came in (ask them to pay shipping, and credit you back $35 when they get the old battery). They should do this. They might have to put a hold on your credit card for the cost of the 3-cell until they get the 6-cell back, and then credit you the cost of the 3-cell and the $35 difference to work everything out. You’d end up with the bottom line you expect: a 3-cell, $35 back, and no additional charges. Keep asking to talk to someone else (or just e-mail customer service saying exactly what you need), and it should get taken care of.

    Final note: sometimes if you e-mail asking for a special discount or extra help even when it’s totally unnecessary, you might get it. I’ve gotten a $15 credit at Amazon for no reason other than them being nice. They won’t do it every time, but it really helped make a netbook SSD upgrade cheap…and me a loyal customer.

    Again, be nice, and just tell a company what you need & expect to make things right. They have a lot to deal with, but they do want to keep their customers and usually will help if they know how.

42. Weatherman must be the pushy salesperson. Jerkstore must be his mom…

43. I think your definition of communism and the actual definition of communism may not be the same thing.

    1. I suspect he may, however, have the correct definition of sarcasm.

44. The real issue here seems to be a returns policy that treats a removable battery the same as an integrated video chipset or processor.

    Dell’s return policy says Lisa should return the whole computer, then order a new one with the correct size battery. What an inefficient waste on Dell’s behalf.

    Would it really be so hard to consider a battery as a separate part, and allow Lisa to return it for a different battery, charging her for shipping but crediting her the difference in price?

45. This is terrible customer service – no matter if the customer is “wrong” (and I don’t believe he was in this case), the service rep’s “job” is to satisfy the customer – not berate, belittle, or command him.

    What a disappointing story – I deal with Dell Business service frequently, and they are nothing but helpful, courteous and efficient. Just shows you get what you pay for.

46. This is actually a case where the company (Dell) is the poster child for Wall Street excess.

    Sometime in he last few years, the stock analysts decided that Dell should be making about 50% higher return on investment.

    Dell did what most companies in that position do – they caved. Over a period of time, they cheapened the product and screwed over the employees – standard tactics.

    They also dumped a customer service organization that it had taken 20 years to build and outsourced customer support to some company in India. These were dedicated hard-working employees, but they lacked the knowledge and experience to run this kind of operation. Indian companies can also be highly authoritarian and try to get results by demanding them.

    Having followed the advice of Wall Street and the stock analysts, Dell has become less functional and (most likely) less profitable.

    When it really starts to come down around their ears, the final step on the the road to self destruction is to cook the books and pretend to be making a higher profit.

47. This might indeed be a waste of column space and extended thought, in my mind, if it weren’t for this part:

    But in the hour and a half that I spent on the phone with Dell, I spoke to about ten different people, listened to an hour of hold music, repeated my customer number, my order number, my address, my return authorization number, my purchase ID number, my phone number, and my computer’s service tag number at least two dozen times total, and spelled out my name another dozen times.

    This is something worthy of rumination.

    I would love to hear, for once, from the lips of a webmaster of a large e-commerce enterprise, why it is more desirable to tolerate an ugly kludge (which Dell’s system must be if the experience was accurately recalled) than hiring some talent to make pages that work together the way they could. I would think the long-run time savings alone would be worth it ten times over.

    My best guess: The data from the current system is not designed to be portable, so they’d have to hire a legion of datamining gnomes to grab the raw stuff to shoehorn into the new data tables, amiright?

48. @jerkstore Was I a jerk about it? Totally and without shame. So were you. I was simply making a complaint that I doesn’t want to read let alone even be offered these types of comments IN THE FUTURE. Kind of like you. Thank you for joining me in your own jerkstore.

49. ExACTLY gARY. So what do we do?

50. @#12 sef

    “Congratulations – you just got someone fired during the recession by slating Dell’s customer service on the basis of your interaction with this individual.”

    First of all, if anyone got fired over this, it’s because they were doing a shitty job. Secondly, getting someone fired from a commission based phone sales position is doing them a favor. The ONLY thing that Lisa should have done differently is a bit of research.

    1. “First of all, if anyone got fired over this, it’s because they were doing a shitty job. Secondly, getting someone fired from a commission based phone sales position is doing them a favor.”

       I take into account that you choose to call yourself nutbastard but your lack of compassion for this person is still crass – getting fired from a commission only sales job is not being done a favour because having had a commission only sales job kind of suggests that you didn’t have a lot of options to begin with and now you have even less.

       Sales people would be far better at customer service if they weren’t paid on commission at all. Commission is a corporate scam to avoid the perceived “cost” of giving their employees a secure income and corporations pay for this “saving” by making their employees’ lives miserable and poorer customer relations.

       1. Sales people would be far better at customer service if they weren’t paid on commission at all. Commission is a corporate scam to avoid the perceived “cost” of giving their employees a secure income and corporations pay for this “saving” by making their employees’ lives miserable and poorer customer relations.

          And what would be Dell’s motivation to change that policy, if a blogger for one of the most popular blogs in the world sits on her experience rather than shaming them in public? None whatsoever, if their bottom line isn’t affected.

51. >> Congratulations – you just got someone fired during the recession by slating Dell’s customer service on the basis of your interaction with this individual.

    Yes! Congratulations indeed! A competent, ethical person can now take her place, one that doesn’t screw the customer (in a recession!!!) by misrepresenting refunds she has no knowledge of or employing guild-inducing tactics to make a sale.

    Although, truth be told, calls are routinely monitored–if she’s fired it won’t be because her first name was mentioned on a blog.

52. Next time, Samsung NC-20 from Amazon. Entirely different galaxy.

53. Bottom line, here: if you want to know why customer service is so bad, read some of the above comments to see what they have to draw on for hires. This is an angry country we live in.

54. I also bought the extended life battery on my mini 10. At the time of purchase, it was not made clear the battery stuck out of the end of it. I’ve gotten used to it, but it really was a surprise when I unboxed it.

55. I can’t believe people are slamming the author on this.

    So what if she ordered the wrong part ? The Dell representatives were trying to upsell a $129 battery… and on commission. The right thing to do would have been to say: “You can either purchase a new battery for $129 and have the old one refunded at $35 OR you can take advantage of Dell’s 21-30 day return policy”.

    Dell wasn’t providing customer service, they were providing customer management and misleading.

56. I have the exact same Dell Mini 10v with the red and the 6-cell battery. I can’t help but wonder: how the hell was the 6-cell battery too big for your bag? How small is your bag to where the extra 3-4 inches of space the 6-cell takes up is too big? I carry mine around in a messenger bag, no fuss, no muss.

    1. My Dell Mini 9 fits in my (not very big) purse. I weep for the day when it dies and I must upgrade to the 10, and risk it not fitting. The 10 6-cell definitely wouldn’t, and given that I bought the computer to be tiny and ultra portable, I side with Lisa re: the computer not fitting in a bag. (Of course, that said, even if they’d offered 6-cells when I bought mine, I wouldn’t have gone with it, as the #1 complaint I have seen about them is that they’re big and heavy and unwieldy.)

57. “To me the only real mistake here is that the first rep didn’t explain the rules to you. ”

    You don’t have a problem with Jame essentially lying about the refund price and then breaking the illusion of ‘Customer Service’ by pleading with Lisa to make the sale (let alone *refusing* to pass her call on to someone who could actually help her), regardless of whether it would solve her problem or not?

    If a service call crosses professional lines, into personal territory, it should be to the benefit of the customer (eg. going off-script to figure a problem out), not to what the customer can do for the sales person.

    1. Perhaps it’s a matter of perspective. I didn’t see her as lying I saw her as genuinely clueless and desperate. I’ve honestly never encountered a sales person who didn’t act like that so it doesn’t strike me as unusual. The sales force there is high pressure. They will fire you if you don’t make a certain quota and it’s likely that rep was already on the way out hence the blatant pathetic desperation. I’ve heard of people crying.

       Granted, sounds like sales isn’t her thing. Hey, I’d saw my foot off before I’d do sales so I understand!

       But as for not being right about the refund price, perhaps I’m confused, but it sounds like she didn’t understand herself that the customer was asking about returning the battery itself. So not ideal to me, but not surprising considering it’s not really a sales rep’s job. The confusion started with the first employee, and could have been prevented there. I’m not sure that any sales person actually thinks whining about her commission is a way to make a sale. Most people couldn’t care less if you died, let alone made commission… so to me it rings more sad than evil.

58. If I’m in the market for a new laptop, this information can help to inform me before I make the same mistake. Is it a crisis? No. Is it a few hours of frustrating inconvenience I could avoid having heard Lisa’s story? Yes.

    Not sure why people find it necessary to determine the veracity of everything on the Internets. I come to BB Gadgets to find out information on Gadgets, and that’s exactly what this post provides.

59. The road to Dell is paved with good intentions.

    @Talia: illegal use of facile tropes. Five yard penalty, loss of down.

60. Is there any way for us non-media types to get in touch with a Dell Spokesperson? I’d like some more info on my customer service disaster (and some satisfaction, but I won’t hold my breath). I’m sure everyone has their own story to tell.

    Dell was kind enough to take my money on a gadget order, send me a confirmation email that the item had been shipped, and then after weeks of not getting delivery I found out that the item was out of stock. It has been nearly 5 months, and I have not been able to get my money returned to me.

61. @Sef

    So wait, let me get your take on this straight. You’re saying that the author should feel bad because she had a terrible experience and told people about it? Because that’s all I see. Nowhere in her post did she demand for someone to be fired. If the company chose to fire the sales rep, how is that the author’s responsibility?

    And yes, if that sales person lost her job, then that’s a shame but it’s certainly not entirely without reason. When you do your job poorly, you run the risk of getting fired. That’s kind of how jobs work. I believe firmly that the customer is not always right, but the rep lied to the author in order to make a sale. Not only is that bad service, but pretty unethical as well so I can’t legitimize spending a lot of time feeling sorry for the rep.

    Personally, I agree with nixiebunny that the most appropriate response would have been to simply return the laptop completely and never purchase anything from Dell again.

62. I used to buy from Dell… but not since 2002. That’s when I first experienced their customer service and their substandard product quality. That was the last PC I ever bought. Thank you Dell for converting me to Mac.

63. My ordeals with Dell Customer Service were the primary reason for my switch to Apple. The Dell Customer Service reps are almost as clueless and incompetent as the phone operators at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (now there’s a phone experience that will truly drive you insane).

64. My thoughts:

    I’ve dealt with a lot of customer service over the years, and have worked in telephone customer service and sales.

    When you’re calling for service on something very complicated (i.e. a computer manufacturer/retailer with customizable desktops/laptops/netbooks/business packages etc. and products/deals that change nearly weekly) you are going to have a HARD time finding someone who knows everything. I worked on the phones for a bank–much simpler than this–and even our best reps were routinely stumped and had to put folks on hold/call managers/look things up/occasionally get it wrong.

    This WAS shit customer service, and it is to be despised. However, I’m a fairly intelligent guy (currently attending a top 20 US law school) and I am sure that I would be unable to be terribly helpful in Dell’s service dept on the phones. There’s just too much going on.

    On the other hand, I’ve had fantastic experience with their live chat help. I’ve gotten correct answers all five or so times I’ve chatted with them, had them mail me drivers/windows etc. They’re really very good when they’re not on the phone and can take their time.

    My two cents. I’d hate to see people spnd 2-3 times as much for an Apple that they do not need because of a few poor service reps.

65. @sef

    “getting fired from a commission only sales job is not being done a favour because having had a commission only sales job kind of suggests that you didn’t have a lot of options to begin with and now you have even less.”

    gee, i wonder why that could be. oh yeah, because that person is patently unemployable. sorry, but i’m short on sympathy for people who do shitty work. being a helpful sales representative isn’t rocket science, and the incompetent have no one to blame but themselves. i worked in customer service (pizza) for 3 years out of high school, and people remembered to ask for me specifically. why? because they knew i’d go out of my way in order to make sure that everything was all good to begin with, and, failing that, that i would bend over backwards to fix whatever the issue was.

    i dont see how you can make the case for this rep NOT getting fired. the rep was dishonest and misleading in a petty attempt to screw the customer and collect his/her pittance of a commission. the rep obviously didn’t give a damn about Dell, who, by definition, he/she REPRESENTS. if you don’t care about maintaining your employers image, your employer has every reason to not want you representing them.

66. There’s no excuse for the treatment your received, but I may have some insight into the behavior of the reps you spoke with.

    1) The sales rep may have wanted the commission not just for the extra money, but to keep their job. It’s possible that there was a sales goal that each rep has to get each month and if they don’t meet it they will be collecting unemployment the next month.

    2) The reps may be evaluated by the time they stay on the phone with each call. It can be easier just to make up an answer to transfer instead of taking the extra minutes to verify the correct information.

    3) The information the reps have access to in many cases is the same information that you can get off of the website. In many cases they may not have any better access to additional information about the issue than you do.

    Once again, not an excuse for their behavior, but more of it may be blamed on the overall company policies.

67. I had an issue with a Dell sales person who would not transfer me to a supervisor when I asked her to. I had a tech question about a Dell POS system and ended up talking with a sales person. She just wouldn’t hang up, transfer or speak. I asked what she was doing and I was told that it was because she wanted the commission. By this time, I had wasted 20 minutes with this twit so,I told her that I didn’t like her and that I would make very sure she received nothing from any purchase I made. She just stayed on the line breathing at me. I had to hang up and start the whole call again.

68. @the r kelly

    “When you’re calling for service on something very complicated you are going to have a HARD time finding someone who knows everything.”

    If you work selling computer parts, you do not need to know ‘everything’. You need to know what those parts are, and how much they cost. You need to know your companies return and exchange policies. If you don’t know those things, you damn well better know how to go about finding them out.

    With computers, you need maybe a day to familiarize yourself with the components. If you don’t know what RAM is, or the difference between a 3 cell and a 6 cell battery, then you have no business selling computer parts.

    I run into this with people who sell and rent cars. I rented a Cobalt from Enterprise a year or so ago. I asked what the displacement of the engine was and he said “Four”. I asked what the average MPG was and he shrugged and admitted that he doesn’t know much about cars.

    When it’s your job to rent cars to people, when you get PAID to do so, wouldn’t you think you *might* want to brush up on what the hell a car actually IS? All I could get out of the guy was that this particular car apparently features four tires and a steering wheel, and presumably a combustion engine of some sort.

69. I just had Dell sales/service call me as the warranty on my desktop will be up soon.
    I told Gunan, or Gupta (he was never clear) that I was about to install Windows 7 on that machine, and I wanted to know if the warranty would still be valid. He offered to sell me Windows 7, which I already had, but was completely unable to answer the warranty question. He struggled for a few moments and his supervisor tried to come in and rescue the call. “Steve” was not much more help. Both had been taken off the script by my question, and had not be provided with those answers. It was not a good experience.
    I don’t blame Dell, but I am never happy when I get such poor out sourced help support. I will most likely buy Dell again, you can get a native speaking sales person, but I can’t recommend them to the non-tech savy anymore.

70. I used to work for Dell, specifically tech support. The sales incident is only surprising in that they were so flagrant about why they were jerking you around; calls are recorded and anyone auditing that probably would have plowed them under. Not that Sales doesn’t have an incredibly high turnover anyway… But as for how much they can be trusted, I routinely had to fix situations where they would completely mislead a customer to raise their commissions, whether it was in selling an upgrade to a 64-bit OS and promising all their apps would run fine, to selling extra hardware that wasn’t standard on the model and promising our help setting it up. (Dell policy would not allow us to support this extra hardware, and would also require its removal before any attempt to troubleshoot, as it wasn’t standard to the model.) But the lesson there is, just never deal with sales reps, because they have no technical expertise unless they happen to have it on their own, and they will likely mislead you if the opportunity arises for profit.

    As for the correct procedure in this case… Policy may have changed, but what is supposed to happen is a return processed at MSRP for the hardware in question, then a sale of the “upgraded” part at MSRP. What sounds like happened was that whoever was reached told you the price was using the actual cost of the part, which is available on the rep’s end, but then trying to sell at MSRP. The worst part is, it doesn’t sound like you were ever directed to the correct department, Customer Care, which is separate from both Sales and Support. Admittedly, a battery may not qualify for the standard upgrade program, but there’s also no reason it shouldn’t, because the justifications you were given were frankly nonsense attempting to lower someone’s work load. Every one of the components named qualify for at least the old individual exchange upgrade program, though the processor complicated matters depending on your support contract.

    Still… It’s unfortunate you had this experience. I still use Dell myself, but it’s mainly because it doesn’t make a difference for white box hardware and I know the tech support system enough to get what I need accomplished without a run-around. For new customers, especially just buying a personal system… I could never recommend them.

71. …and with nought but the smallest of differences, throughout the human world today and every other day this dialogue cycles on. Building momentum with every turn; the pure, inescapable, unwavering immanence devours all conversational reality in it’s path!

72. I just bought a Dell Mini 10v as well, I want the 6 cell battery, but have the 3.

    I’d be happy to trade with you. Email me if you’re interested.

73. @blueelm

    “Perhaps it’s a matter of perspective. I didn’t see her as lying I saw her as genuinely clueless and desperate.”

    I find drawing a line between ‘unethical’ and ‘incompetent’ to be an unnecessary waste of ink.

    1. I guess my issue is that without the first mistake the second would never have happened. It’s not that I think Jame sounds like a great employee, but rather the whole altercation there could have been prevented by the first person.

       Eh… I’m getting tired of talking about this now so I think that’s gonna be the last I say on it. It’s not that interesting really.

    2. Oh yeah, but seriously thank god you don’t work in law! Those aren’t synonyms for a reason.

74. My Dell laptop keyboard had a key go dead. I called Dell and asked about a replacement keyboard, not an external keyboard, but one that was for the laptop. Yes, they had it. It would cost $35 or so (it has been a while). I placed the order. I then thought about it a bit more, and called customer service to ask about the order, and re-confirm that it was a replacement for the laptop keyboard, and not an external plug-in keyboard. I was once again assured it was. A week later my new external keyboard arrived. I called Dell, and was told that a replacement for the laptop keyboard was NOT available. I sent the external keyboard back.

    I went back to Vietnam, where I happened to be working, went to a local computer shop, and for quite a bit less money had a new keyboard installed, in about 15 minutes time. Dell service, in some parts of the world is pretty impressive – as long as it isn’t Dell providing it!

75. And once again Dell shows how little it cares about individual customers.

    I needed a laptop for a trip earlier this year. After weeks of looking at every model under the sun, I was down to 3 options for the features I wanted – Dell, Lenovo, and Apple. I’d never been a Mac user, and didn’t want to pay the premium, so it was Dell and Lenovo. I found the Lenovos rather dull, and ordered a Dell.

    I customized the laptop and placed my order. The next day I checked on the status and one of my choices (the wifi card) had been changed without notifying me. I called Dell and got a similar runaround. Nobody could give me a reason for the change, and nobody could change it back. My only option was to cancel the order and re-order my original system online. I complained to the CS rep I was on the phone with, and told him to cancel the whole order as I’d be going elsewhere, as there was no guarantee Dell could get me my system before I left. I also told him to cancel the laptop sleeve I had ordered. Not even a hint of sympathy from him, or an offer of expediting a new order, or any other compensation for my trouble.

    The next day, I walked into the Apple store and bought a Macbook. It took 10 minutes from start to finish and I walked out with a laptop that did everything I wanted. The price (a few hundred more than the Dell) was worth the lack of hassle.

    Two days later, the sleeve from Dell arrived. I called Dell and they said the cancellation never went through for the sleeve (but it did for the laptop). They picked up the sleeve free of charge at least.

    Now I only order 3rd party items from Dell (batteries, video games) when they’re on sale. Dealing with them for their core business is a pain in the ass.

76. Dell is terrible for things like this.

    They canceled the Mini12, and now when I put my Mini12 serial number into their support site, it comes back that the serial number does not exist. Likewise calling up Dell for parts or service. They ask for the serial number, then tell me I must have given it to them wrong. Most don’t even know that the Mini12 even existed (they sold it from May – August this year). Now I cannot get replacement parts, I cannot redeem my warranty, I can’t even download the user manuals. All because they decided to remove the item from their system instead of just taking it off the sales page…

    Bureaucracy, red tape, and terribly trained foreign call centers. Just wait until you call their tech support (*shudder*)…

77. Worst computer purchase I ever made in life was a Dell 3-year extended warranty. I tried to use it twice and was told ridiculous things to simply get me off the phone. This was back when Dell outsourced support to some Indian company and apparently paid them per incident, so the poor person answering the phone was incentivized to answer the largest number of calls possible. I was told that things like multiple users on XP wasn’t supported just so I would hang up. To be fair, Dell says they no longer have outsourced support and those problems have been fixed. But for my money, the best way to fix the problem is give me a not-DOA warranty, like maybe for a week. But a 3-year warranty on a Dell is just a money-sink as far as I’m concerned.

78. This is timely for me.
    I spent two hours last night on the phone with Medicare’s 800 number. After getting incorrect information from the first rep, I called back and asked to speak to a supervisor. I was then disconnected. This happened two more times until I was really pissed off. Each of these people also had me spell out my name address SS# repeatedly.
    When I finally spoke to a supervisor, he apparently is a 15 year old boy with an attitude. I asked him for his name and the mailing address of their office. He asked me why I wanted that information twice before giving it to me begrudgingly.
    What is wrong with customer service?

79. I didn’t read all the comments, so I apologize if this is a repeat, but…

    You _could_ return the whole system and then buy another with the right battery. Dell allows you to return for any reason within the first 30 days(if memory serves).

    And to insure that this post is worth something, I had a problem with my wife’x XPS 1330. The mouse pad died. I worked with a CS tech on the phone for about an hour. We agreed the mouse pad needed to be replaced. She organized that. A guy showed up at my door, pulled the thing apart, put it back together in about an hour and it’s worked flawlessly ever since.

    I’m a Software Developer in the Silicon Valley. Judging by the comments I did read, I guess maybe we get it better here.

80. Sounds like when my MacBook’s logic board was damaged. The headphone sensor got bent but had to get sent in to Apple. It was returned a week later with a faulty logic board that caused my screen to die repeatedly. I sent it in again, and they replaced my hard drive and lost all my data without warning. The third time, they did nothing because they said they couldn’t find any problem. The fourth and final time they replaced the logic board with a working one. After more than a month, I finally had a working computer when the biggest problems were caused by Apple’s own incompetence.

81. Why not just sell the perfectly working and new battery on Ebay? You would certainly get a good price…

82. This.
    When I was given an HD TV, I hooked my computer to it. It worked for a few weeks, but then, suddenly, the refresh rate would not change to be compatible (not sure why they use such a crap rate on the LCD anyhow). Anyhow, after much effort to solve it on my part (including talking to the graphics card company), I called Dell…where I had to renew my warranty or pay an absurd fee per call. I had a similar fee issue in that the person I was talking to said that if I bought a warranty, they’d subtract the fee of the current call from it. They gave me a total, which although quite high for a student, was more reasonable than paying for BOTH the warranty and the call (I later learned they had charged me a different sum and that the person who had quoted me the amount did not have the authority to do so, nor was Dell willing to change the fee to that which was quoted me.).
    Then, I got transferred through three or four different technicians until one somewhat knew what they were talking about. After about 3 hours, they had finally replicated everything I had done- and their solution was to reinstall the OS. After a few days where I was backing up my system (having just arrived at med school, I had a ton of new things on my HD and had to basically live on my computer), I called back to reinstall the OS, which didn’t work. A good few hours later (after having to go through their maze-like call network since they didn’t call me back like they said they would), I was finally talking to someone who had gotten to the appendix of the “Fixing Dell computers remotely” manual– and he was re-writing parts of my registry. The computer still doesn’t perform like it used to (the refresh rate will change, but the resolution is stuck on 800X600 at that rate), but I didn’t have the time to deal with another few hours of meandering Dell computer-poking.
    A few weeks later, my battery life was running out. I tried to contact Dell to see if my newly purchased warranty would cover it (one can dream, yeah?). For a few days, I tried to call both via phone and their online chat service, but was constantly disconnected before communicating with a person. I was beginning to think something was suspicious when I finally got through to someone…I certainly did not buy my new battery through Dell’s obscenely marked-up store.
    The worst part is that I was considering purchasing one of the mini10s to be the classroom/travel supplement to my behemoth 17″, but after paying a ton of money for a dismal performance in customer service, I’d rather not buy a Dell again. And prior to this, I’d used three different generations of Dells for the past 7-8 years without much incident (it took them an extra 5-6 weeks to construct and ship my rather expensive laptop [overpriced], which they told us about in spurts of two-week updates– and they didn’t really apologize or try to appease us in any way. But at least it worked when it arrived.)

83. Dell is exceptionally terrible, no doubt about it. I’ve been calling catalogs to get my family off their mailing lists to cut down on junk mail, and it’s been very effective with every company except Dell.

    I’ve called them a dozen times trying to get off their mailing list, and every time I have to wait on hold for 15 minutes to talk to a person. When I finally get through, they confirm that I’ve been removed from the mailing list, and say that it might take up to 3 months for the catalogs to stop coming, as they’re printed in advance. 3 months later, they’re always still coming. This has been going on for years. Even something as simple as removing a name from a list is far, far beyond them.

84. Saying that she won’t get her commission is a big no-no. Unless she did it in a pleasant enough way.

    That said, while I want to sympathize with your account (and lord knows I’ve had enough hellish calls to customer service), how much of this is shaded? First of all, was this at the end of a bad day? Second, I have to ask – what is being omitted?

    It does sound like substandard support but I can’t help but think we’re not getting the whole picture.

85. Ick. I’ll put Dell on my no-buy list right after Best Buy. I hope you don’t mind but I have to warn everyone about their utmost skeeviness.

    Skip this if you don’t want the whole ugly spiel and just know that Best Buy is the devil. But if you want the detailed nightmare, read on.

    I went into one of their stores in September to look at netbooks (I wanted the Toshiba NB205 with the amazing battery life) and they hyped me up to wait for Windows 7 because it was going to be so awesome and great and wonderful. They said I could buy my netbook then and get a free upgrade, but I should wait till the big release in October because there were going to be sales (there weren’t, by the way, but Best Buy associates are not on commission I guess, so it’s easier to tell the customer to come back later?).
    Anyway I came back in October and they told me they were out of the Toshibas because the relase was on the 22nd and they weren’t getting any new ones in before then because they weren’t selling any with the old OS anymore. So I came back on the 22nd, asked the guy in the computer area if they had the Windows 7 Toshiba netbook yet, and he lead me right to it. I was excited because it was the brown one, which they had told me wasn’t going to be an option, and I love the brown – it’s so pretty!. But when I bought it (well, my family bought it for me – birthday present) and went to set it up it had the old OS on it.

    No big deal, I’m thinking, just a mistake, I’ll go swap it out. So I go back and it turns out that none of the brown ones had Win7. I said no big deal again and asked them to upgrade it, and the guy said that would cost me some crazy amount of money. When I pointed out that they’d told me they were selling me a computer with Win7 on it, one of the managers told them yes, they should upgrade me. So I go to the Geek Squad and they say they can’t upgrade me, free or otherwise, because they don’t have the netbook version of the software to load. No big deal, I say – when will you get it? I can come back for the upgrade. The guy looks at me blankly and says they’ll never get it.

    It just kept escalating from there. I spent over 8 hours and three trips back and forth from that Thursday to the following Monday night trying to get something worked out. Every step of the way I’m the one who offered them options of ways they could take care of me (a *lot* of increasingly creative options). They never once thought of anything on their own, or made so much as a phone call on my behalf even when I asked them to.

    This is not a simple case of one bad store manager, either. I’m talking about store associates, store managers, the general manager (who dodged me completely – leaving as soon as I was supposed to get to talk to him), the Geek Squad, the Customer Service people in the store, someone from the company’s main phone Customer Service, that person’s supervisor, and THAT guy’s supervisor. Not one of them could figure out a way to give me the computer they told me I’d bought.

    Not only that, but in the end I found out they’d scammed me – like fraud type scam as far as I could tell. The computer I bought had a tag in front of it in the store saying $399. The weird thing was the specs that are usually listed weren’t there – not even the manufacturer or model numbers or anything. Since my family actually paid for the computer, I didn’t realize until I finally gave up and told Best Buy to take the stupid thing back that they had in actuality charged us $499. The guy told me that’s the actual price of the brown one. The blue one, however, which has the right OS, is $399.

    They charge an extra $100 for the service of screwing you over at Best Buy.

    Three different people in the store had told me independantly that the computers were identical except for the color, by way of trying to convince me to take the blue one and leave them alone. As soon as I pointed out the price discrepancy, they said the brown one actually was different after all and had some added features (like tears and a headache I guess). When I pointed out that they had a bit of fraud on their hands with the tag with the wrong price, they told me someone must have taken the $499 price tag out of the little sleeve (because those are collector’s items I guess). I asked them what, then, was being sold for $399, since the Blue version was on the next aisle over and the only other product within range of that price tag was an external hard drive that cost $69. They had no answer for that so I told them I wasn’t leaving the store until I saw them put the actual price they are charging in front of the computer.

    I should have called the BBB at that point, but I was exhausted dealing with them. Twice during this ridiculous saga they had me in tears.

    So that night, after I’d gotten my family’s money back, I hopped on Amazon and bought the brown Toshiba NB205 for $399 with no tax and free shipping, and it arrived ahead of schedule with the correct OS and no more nightmares.

    Just a warning.

86. My last few computers have been Dells, for both work and home. They always seem to last for at least six years. The one time that my video card died, someone drove 60 miles from the nearest city to my house to install a new one within less than 24 hours. So, I’m pretty happy with them.

    The advantage of calling them versus dealing with them online, at least for making a purchase, is that the sales reps have all kinds of deals, discounts, rebates and upgrades that you’ll never figure out if you buy online. I’ve always ended up with 150% of the features for about $200 less than if I had just put the order together myself.

    But, if someone told to buy something so that she could get a commission, I’d hang up. I had a boss once who told me to do something a certain way or it would cut into her bonus. I quit on the spot. It wasn’t so much that I thought that she was greedy. I just couldn’t imagine working for someone so delusional that she thought that would motivate me.

87. Sorry, you lost me when not fitting into your favorite bag was a good enough reason to accept half the battery life. I’d just buy/make/have made a slightly bigger bag.

88. HaHa, i’ve heard similar stories about dell. Though not all support sucks, I work for National Instruments as a technical supporter (Applications Engineer), and I like to think we do a good job. We always give a reference number to track back to the same engineer, all supporters know customers get surveys, we will work on issues for days-weeks-sometimes months till they’re resolved (if needed).

    I think my favorite thing we do that I haven’t seen at any other company is called warm transferring, we never blindly put you on hold, we always introduce you to the next engineer/sales/customer-supporter and stay on the line till you’re good to go. That would have eliminated this whole situation listed above.

    More companies need to treat their customer support lines as an asset rather than a liability, a chance to win over customers. I once was on hold for over an hour with AT&T, when they easily could have just taken my number and called me back…unacceptable. Come on America, we’re already loosing the price war, it’s not too long till some other country is going to figure out how to monopolize our service industry by doing it better than us, then what will we have left?

89. I can totally understand your issue. While I’ve never had to deal with bad customer service (rather ironically the only time I ever used customer service was with Sony and it was quite good) the underlying misunderstanding is completely understandable. For starters, when it comes to batteries, most companies don’t give you any indication that an alternate battery would bulge out, let alone how much. Besides the fact that it doesn’t fit in your bag, I would also mention how ugly batteries that bulge out look.
    And what’s with all the apologists? If a company has lousy customer service they deserve to get called out on it. Also, the Apple-basher needs to take a deep breath. It’s not that serious, and you shouldn’t feel insulted by someone having a good experience with a company you don’t like.

    1. I am merely pointoing out blind fanboy support in clear contradiction to the experiences of others. He didn’t say why his experience with apple was good, so I think including in his post that he likes apple is quite irrelevant – and if it is OK for him to state personal opinion, I dont see why it is so bad for me to do the same.

       If a company has lousy customer service they deserve to get called out on it.
       Thanks for agreeing with my point.

       If you have nothing with which to rebut my comments, then take your self-rightous ass elsewhere.

       1. Teapot, calm down.

90. Dell US must be very different to Dell Australia.

    I’ve been buying computers from Dell for years (both for my workplace and personally) and I must say I’m yet to have had a bad experience with them.

    The sales people have always been extremely helpful, the technical support people have always a) been knowledgeable and b) treated me like someone with a brain in my head and the warranty services I’ve received have been second to none.

    On the one occasion where I’ve returned something that had become faulty and they didn’t have the exact part I already had I just got a free upgrade (80gb 2.5″ replaced with a 120gb drive of the same speed).

    In each of the 3 times I’ve had faulty parts I’ve had the machines working again the very same day.

    Oh and the time my hard drive died the guy even gave me an external hard drive enclosure which he said I could borrow to try to recover my data which I had foolishly not backed up, along with a return parcel for the faulty hard drive once I’d done this. Unfortunately the drive seemed pretty stuffed and I lost most of the data but that I blame on Western Digital or Seagate or whoever manufactured the damn thing.

91. Your first mistake: buying a Dell.
    Your second mistake, calling their deplorable “customer service”. If you could have a second chance at this, you may want to have considered hanging up and starting over again.

92. Dell’s business side is MUCH better about stuff like this than the home side–they really are two different companies. I’ve ordered servers with the wrong parts before and they were quite happy to swap for the new parts and modify the original order. They even next-day shipped the new part for free.

93. I think Dell is somewhat similar to Toyota.

    They are coasting on the reputation they garnered as being the most reliable in the industry back in the ’90s or so.

    Since then, the quality and service of both companies has gone downhill. They still make OK stuff, but certainly not the best of the best.

    Chalk me up as another person whose call center experience with Dell put me on the “never again” list.

94. Let’s just say I work for an outsourcer who handles this sort of thing. *cough CABLE COMPANY CALLS MOSTLY cough* This is just the sort of thing that happens ROUTINELY. Why? Because in order to save money, the original company outsources. In order to save more money, they allow for the outsourcing company to train their employees to the very minimum. This is why a person who has been with the ‘company’ for a year cannot answer a simple question such as what such and such on the bill is for. In most situations what happens is a % of the calls are given to actual in-house representatives, who are trained for over a month to know everything there is to know about the product, service, and company, and the overflow is shifted to the outsourcer who spent 1 week training employees to be extremely nice and know virtually nothing. Then there are the few of us, who have the terrible luck of having to work for the outsourcer because the company itself doesn’t even exist in our area – but are smart enough to train ourselves while on the job. Not only to we get to hear customers scream at us about how horrible their experience has been so far (hold time, crappy IVRs, reps who screwed them over), but we get to hear how horribly incompetent our coworkers are allowed to be. In short – NEW EMPLOYMENT NEEDED FOR HUNDREDS OF QUICK LEARNERS – OUTSOURCERS AND HEADHUNTERS NEED NOT APPLY. :-P

95. Wow, thanks guys for using my photo. I feel honored :)

    DISASTER_AREA

96. oh sista grrrlfren’ i know EXACTLY how you feel. a few years ago when i was having some laptop issues, i was shocked because dell sent a person TO MY HOME within a day or two. i was expecting the SAME service on my NEW laptop (with warranty). something went amiss and i called customer service. they had ME tear apart the laptop while giving me instructions on the phone. well, couldn’t be fixed. some sort of virus ate my harddrive. so they get me to BUY AN EXTENDED WARRANTY and tell me they’ll send me a new harddrive. ok says i, innocently. well they sent me a new harddrive but charged me about 300.00 for it (of course if i bought a new harddrive on my own it would be a fraction of that cost). when i called to have that charge taken off of my bill they told me (dell told me) they couldn’t do it unless i sent in my fried harddrive. I TOLD THEM NO EFFING WAY was i going to do that. it’s MY harddrive with MY PERSONAL INFO ON IT.

    needless to say this is the LAST dell i am going to buy.

    the end

97. Oh god, the nightmare that is Dell costumer service still can keep me up at night.

98. Use the USA Unresolved Issues form:
    https://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dellcare/en/outstanding_issues_dhs?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

99. You are not alone. See this article in Forbes magazine about a lawyer who had an even more disastrous encounter with Dell.

    http://www.brokeandbroker.com/index.php?a=blog&id=266

100. I find this especially amusing since I used to work for Dell about 2 years ago. I used to work out of the Ottawa, Canada office. We had a number of other sites, one in India, one in Philippine, one in US and honestly, we had the worst time ever getting transfers from every other site. Customers would breath a sigh of relief when they heard a Canadian voice. Some customers simply demanded to speak to no one but a Canadian rep when they got through to other sites. How did Dell repay us for such amazing tech support and customer service?? They laid off 1500 people from Ottawa to move to the Philippine and India cause its cheaper!!

     1. It probably saved them money on warranties they had to honor too.

101. Dell seems to have designed their “customer service” as some sort of a Skinner Box to test the limits of frustration they can inflict on those of us with the misfortune to fall into their grasp.

     I recently placed an order for a new laptop that triggered my descent into Dell Hell. Suffice it to say that I will never do business with them again!

102. The problem here is not batteries but clarity of business process. I’m in an ongoing saga with O2/Telefonica in the UK over their inability to confirm to me the conditions of the mobile phone service tariff that will prevail for the 24 months I have contracted with them. I was dumbfounded yesterday when a DHL van pulled into my drive way to deliver a Jiffy package that contained a) an A4 delivery note describing b) a single A4 page of their generic business terms and conditions (which I already had a copy of).

     Imbeciles, but it’s a tariff deal I’m happy with today.

     I won’t even go into what I found on their web site when I went looking for the “O2 Price List” advised on said Ts & Cs….

     Back on to Dell, just pass them by, it’s cheaper elsewhere & I’m not suggesting build your own: Apple (compared like for like), Acer, Asus to name but 3.

103. I had the same experience buying what might have been the very same model of netbook from Dell a month or two back. Bought a sleeve for it in the same order, and then when I received it was greatly annoyed to discover what appeared to be a huge freakin’ hinge that left me unable to actually zip the sleeve closed around the netbook. I blamed the Dell system for recommending to me a peripheral purchase that wasn’t actually suited to go with the main product (having had a similar issue with a docking station that turned out to not be for the model of MP3 player I’d ordered) and didn’t realize that the inconvenient bulge was in fact due to the battery upgrade.

     Didn’t bother calling customer service, though. I didn’t pay enough for the sleeve to think it was worth the trouble of getting a refund, and for now I’m just using it unzipped, battery sticking out, until I get around to acquiring a sleeve that actually fits.

104. I completely understand your frustration. I have had so many truly unfortunate experiences with Dell customer service that i will never again buy a product of theirs!

105. According to the timer on my phone, I spent 38 minutes being on hold and talking to 4 people at Dell 2 nights ago. I was advised to buy a replacement part that I did not need. My call was to exchange the incorrect part for the correct one. Even though the call was very frustrating, I will be getting a full return once I print the shipping label and take the box to my local UPS, making sure to write the return authorization number on the box.
     This is my first Dell. So far, it is much easier to drop my computer off at a local business for repair. And I haven’t yet attempted to actual part replacement. I do not look forward to the call to Dell for technical support.

106. I would just get a new bag. I would rather have a bigger bad and longer battery life than have to buy a new battery in a shorter time.

107. Lisa, buying your Dell from their business line (as SeattleDave notes) is the best way to go. They build these to be supported better, to be replaced part-by-part, and to have parts inventory that lasts for a much longer period of time. And the support for the business product lines (both customer service and technical support) is better.

     Don’t buy Dell consumer products if you want to absolutely avoid the type of experience you just wrote about.

108. Lisa, I also note (with some disappointment) that the opportunity for ‘retraining’ that your case hopes to provide will be of limited value.

     It may be that a small number of reps within one group within one call center may be told that “netbooks cannot be serviced part-by-part”, but rest assured that your whole story will not be used as a training case–as useful as that would be.

     And you can be certain that the moral of your story will not be used in training for all Dell (and Dell-contracted) call centers worldwide. Can you imagine how efficiently Dell call centers would operate if such a thing ever happened?

109. I’m reminded of a comment that someone else made in another Dell thread:

     Q: Why is Michael Dell 14 billion dollars richer than you?
     A: You give him your money, and you pay for it with your time.

     For a $279 device, Ms. Katayama easily spent 2-3 hours of her time dealing with this situation. Assuming that she values her personal time as we all do, that’s another $100-$200 of value that she has lost from her life.

     1. old/gold, if only, sigh

        http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27850

110. This, right here, is exactly why I will no longer deal with Dell. I ordered a Mini9 in February. They had a big banner on the site for a Back To School sale (I live in Japan; school starts in April). I ordered it, and then watched the ship date continually slip further into the future. I spent hours on the phone trying to find out when/if I’d ever get the machine, and also to find out how the hell they justified charging my card when 6 months later I still didn’t have the damned thing.

     Finally, after working my way up as high as I could, and when I seemed to be talking to someone who knew something, I asked, “Does this machine exist, or will I be waiting indefinitely?” His response? “Umm… I. Can. Cancel. This. Order. And. Refund. You. Right. Now.”

     Having worked in phone support before myself, I got the message, which was, of course, “There are no machines; we don’t know if or when there ever will be any. Get out now.”

     At about the same time I was thinking of getting the well-reviewed 2408 monitor from them. I didn’t.

     Nope. No more.

111. It seems to me that if you want good quality support from Dell, you have to spend a lot of money and you have to buy the right products.

     I bought an XPS M1730 back when they were brand new. It’s the only time I’ve been an early adopter but I can’t say I’ve been greatly disappointed.

     My experience with their support was facilitated by the battery dying (refusing to charge) at around 2 days and 12 months after purchase. I do not purchase extended warranties. Their phone-tech misdiagnosed a faulty charging circuit on the motherboard, as evidenced by the visiting-to-my-work tech swapping it, to no avail.

     A short argument via email with email-tech resulted in a free replacement battery. Score one point.

     Visit-to-my-work tech had forgotten to reattach the lead to enable keyboard backlight. No big deal, he did offer to come and fix it but I just did it myself (M1730’s are wonderfully easy to take to pieces).

     So, XPS support is pretty good. OK they misdiagnosed, but the particular problem could really have been 50/50 between battery and motherboard. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that Latitude (i.e., business) support is quite reasonable.

     I think *any* big company has the potential to provide either a great or a really bad service, depending on random chance. Apple are not immune to providing really awful customer service experiences, despite some of the comments above lauding them over Dell. Certainly, in my experience, I’ve seen the whole spectrum of possibilities.

112. Corporations should be devoting some time in properly training their customer service staff because THEY are the ones who make the lasting impressions. This event could have been avoided by providing the right information to their employees, and insuring they have been properly trained. These “sales reps” are those who make the lasting impressions. If a customer encounters a bad experience with a sales representative, it could damage the relationship the company had developed with the consumer, this means they can potentially lose them as a customer, a negative reputation may develop due to word-of-mouth”. To me word-of-mouth is the most powerful mode of communication of advertisement. This can damage the likely hood of fixing the problem, that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place. Companies should pay more attention to their reps and to see who is representing the company in a positive matter, this can avoid conflicts, like what happened here. Now the question is, “Would you buy from Dell in the future?”

113. Sympathy for you, Lisa. I once had my DSL cut off by Verizon because after calling to make an inquiry about my service, the “manager” I was on the phone with “forgot” to “confirm” my address (which I confirmed at least twice at the beginning of the call while being transferred from agent to “appropriate” agent), so she cut off my service. What??
     It happens all the time. I surely wish it didn’t.

114. Yay, a Dell thread…

     Strange company, I don’t know what happened to them. When I had a problem with my monitor 1 year (well within the legally binding 2-year warranty in place here in Germany) I got transfered to an actual tech person who helped me track down the problem. It was quite obvious that this wasn’t someone following a script.

     However, shortly before the 3-year warranty by Dell was up, I had to call in because of a defective DVI port. All the exchanges were fast, I’ll grant you that. But they sent me *three* refurbished yet still defective produtcs in a row, before they caved in and sent me the latest model.

     Mind you, I would’ve been perfectly satisfied with a refurbished model – I even told them that when I called in for the 3nd reclamation and the agent said he would look into getting me the newer model, if they just made sure that the blasted thing works. One of the exchanges even had a dirty screen as if it had been sprayed with specks of mud.

115. I bought an Acer Aspire One netbook on a recent trip and, like you, got greedy and bought the bigger battery. Then regretted it once I took it out the box. I would’ve preferred the smaller size and weight but do enjoy the seven hours of battery life.

     I’ve found Dell support very good, but the only experience I’ve had is with Enterprise support, and I pay for that.

116. All Dell computers come with outsourced Indian customer service. Everyone knows that. Buyer beware.

117. yes it took too long, and they inappropriately transferred you. this is what happens in large organizations when you decide to do something that they aren’t preprogrammed to do. luckily you got to the right person within 2 or 3 tries that was happy to explain it to you. still, it seems they offered to buy it back from you at the “system” price, which is essentially what you paid, but most people wouldn’t be interested in. suggestion, buy an extra 3-cell battery from batteries.com at half the price, which will easily fit into your bag, and use the 6-cell at home. this will also keep the 3-cell lasting longer.

     huzzah

118. This all could of been solved by the tech.
     he would of put a dispatch through that the wrong battery was chosen, picked up your old one, sent you the new one, and given your account the refund. But then again the rep needs to know how to do it.

     As an old Level2/Level3 at Dell in the tech department, i can tell you not many know how to do this; but ask to be transferred to another tech, and eventually you’ll find one

119. “It’s part of the components in the system, like the processor, the memory, and the OS; once you receive your system, you can’t pull those parts out. Your options are to return the whole thing or to buy a new battery.””

     Say what again? The battery is obviously not an integrated component if you can “buy a new battery” to replace it…

120. Hey, Lisa, I recommend to you the Bucket Boss brand “contractor’s briefcase”. I’ve been using mine for at least 15 years… best laptop bag ever!

     I think they have it on Amazon, which is a good thing since I just tried to check the Bucket Boss site and it is a hideous, unusable abomination.

     Seriously, great bag. Lightweight, tough as nails and it is built to hold a cell phone, a laptop, a clipboard or notebook, and a selection of professional tools. It has a set of loops built into the top that are intended for holding full-size rolled-up blueprints, but which I can use for holding a brolly, a newspaper, or a mailing tube full of poster-sized artwork.

     Keep the battery, get a better bag!

121. I once had a… comparable… experience with Dell, but I did finally reach someone who was able to help me. In fact, the support technician I started dealing with talked me through the entire process of removing a laptop harddrive and coupling it to a third-party reader to extract the information (the laptop was fried). He even called me back a couple hours later to make sure I had succeeded in my task. Granted, it took a few call transfers to get to him initially, but once I did, it was smooth sailing. Sorry everyone else has had such bad experiences with them…

122. There’s a similar story at http://www.twilightpad.com/messageBoardPost.html?messageBoardPostId=6063.

     There seems to be a trend emerging. Dell is messing up really bad now.

123. your site is very nice, very useful for me

124. Dell customer service is certainly lacking terribly. I called because I needed to consolidate multiple gift cards into one because they only allow one gift card per transaction which is very stupid. I had to call about 5 times because they kept hanging up on me (no joke) and passing me around to other customer service reps who also did not want to help me. Finally I got to a helpful rep and he just could not understand what I wanted to do though I explained it very clearly a few times. Then, he just hung up. So now I have to sell the gift cards on eBay (www.ebay.com – search “dell gift card”) at a very discounted rate and I’m losing terribly on the deal. Dell computers are for the most part good, but customer service is BAD.

125. I bought 4 dell computers and laptops in past years. I bought 5th one which is the newest model 2 months ago. It took them 1 month to deliver, after 2 days the laptop got crashed. They said you can return or get a new one. I returned and order an old model instead. More than one month passed, I still didn’t get my laptop. I tried lots of times to call dell customer service. Only 2 times was picked by someone, after she asked one question, then the phone got cut and asked me to wait. It never got connected. It was the worst service I had had. Dell service is getting terrible now. I just want to call to cancel the order. I don’t trust them anymore.

126. I think I have the same problem as this lady. I also purchased a Dell Inspiron laptop notebook a year ago but the battery seem not to work anymore.
     When I called Dell, they transferred me to India call center and there I was given a third degree and their Asian accent I just did not understand when they insist I buy a warranty stating that unless I buy that warranty, they cannot do anything. My battery built in with my Dell Inspiron 1525 is only a 6 cell and I wanted to buy the 9 cell.
     The woman whom I talked to in India was so arrogant and sarcastic and when I talked to their Supervisor, he insisted I buy the warranty first before attending to my problems.
     I then consulted our local computer stores here and got a reply from Parts.com which is within the lower 48 states of the US.
     I then ordered this battery at the cost of $175.00 9 cell battery complete with warranties, unlike Dell that are selling their laptops only with a 6 cell battery that only guarantee it for 6 months. Thats, I think Dell has been doing all along.
     Next time, get another brand maybe… I am so disgusted with Dell.

127. Lucky guy, just one evening confusion! My laptop is out of work and Dell’s customer service and support have confused me and they are all confused by their colleagues’ work as well for two weeks. Numerous calls still nobody give me on site service. My laptop’s problem is still there. God bless your Dell product in a good condition,I mean hardware, once it is out of work, throw it into garbage or you have to be driven mad by Dell’s customer service and support.:-)

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