I just received a replacement laptop from Dell and it seems they’ve put a lot of effort into the fit and finish department. The machine is slick and stylish and the specs are easily in the range of desktop replacement. While the touch on the keyboard is fine it still feels like they change the layout significantly every year.
The customer support I’ve recieved from Dell has also been a mixed bag. The upper tiers of the support system are great. Yet in stark contrast is the poor treatment I experienced in their front line support. One day in just two calls I spent over 4 hours on the phone, most all of it on hold. I know this because I used the call timer on my speaker phone to measure it. I assumed they were playing some kind of mind game on me when around 4pm PST a gentleman answered the phone questioningly:
Dell rep: Hello? Mr Speaker Phone: Why yes, hello I’ve been on hold half the day. I was told I needed to speak with someone about my repair. Dell rep: Oh I’m sorry sir, everyone has gone home for the day, it appears your call has been left in the queue. <click>
I can only hope that arm of the outsourced support organization has been sacked. At least it is starting to appear that way. Just this week while on hold a real person came on if I was on hold for more than 5 minutes to ask if it was okay for me to remain on hold! It may have been I was actually talking to the receptionist for the upper tier support. I’m not sure.
It is pretty clear that Dell employs the same support tiering that most other companies use. Although with Dell, their upper tier support is extremely personal and friendly and they really go the extra mile. How one goes about getting upper tier support is slightly less clear. I assume that business and corporate customers are fast tracked into this system. I have been an employee of two large Dell shops and from what I’ve heard talking to operations folk they are big fans of Dell support. On the consumer end I’m fairly certain they are employing web scraping companies to seek out customers in need of upper tier support and contacting them directly. I believe this because I recieved two such contacts on this blog and I personally know someone working at a blog scraping company that contracts to Dell for just this type of thing.
The software in the case I know of uses some custom made bots to search, and analyze comments. I’m not certain how this is fed into usable data for Dell. On the surface it sounds a little creepy but if I may be shamefully biased for a moment I think it works remarkably well.
At any rate, I’m very happy with the new hardware. It was a crying shame to burden it with the default Vista install so I’ve got Ubuntu 7.1 running on it already which is where I’m posting from at the moment. More on that later… mmm ubuntu.