An anonymous Dell customer has been trying to get his $3,300 Dell laptop to work for over a year, since the day it first arrived. He's had a terrible run-around from Dell customer service (a familiar story — I've been there with both Apple and Dell), and, having reached the end of his rope, he's written an open letter to Dell's Board, the Austin Better Business Bureau, and a bunch of computer mags. Inquirer UK ran the letter this morning; I wonder if anyone else will: more particularily, I wonder what Dell will do about it. If there's any justice at all, this guy should have just been told that his machine was a DOA lemon and had it replaced; instead, he's put in hundreds of unpaid hours doing Dell's work, trying to make the defective equipment they sent him work.
My big question is, if this gets picked up by enough newspapers and blogs, will Dell replace the guy's machine with a current top-of-the-line box with a fresh one-year warranty and the direct number of a tech-support supervisor who can shepherd him through future problems? That's the kind of service recovery you'd expect from a decent company, especially after being publicly outed for egregious customer abuse.
