Tag: Dell

Well, well, do tell:

Many, many folks sent me news that Dell warned of a bad earnings surprise and that its stock crashed like my Dell laptop. No, I don’t take credit or blame. But I’m not surprised. What do you think is going to happen when a company’s products and service decline? So will sales! So will profit! So will marketshare! So will stock! Doesn’t take a computer to figure that out.

Quelle surprise.

Business Week is staying on Dell’s ass about customer service. After recounting its disasterous satisfaction ratings and various rants against them (including mine) and their panic to hire more customer-service and now their numbnutty attempt to actually start charging more for the crappy service they give, the report says:

While execs won’t say so publicly, the message is clear: That new PC you bring home comes with only the most rudimentary support. More hand-holding costs extra.

Indeed, Dell is rolling back some of the perks that now come standard. BusinessWeek has learned that in mid-October, Dell plans to redefine the term “free shipping” for its low-end models. Instead of delivering them to the customer’s home, Dell will mail them to the nearest post office for pickup. These customers have to pay extra for home delivery — although it comes standard with pricier models such as the new XPS line….

If customers don’t go for the new “pay-up” plans and service keeps sliding, Dell may have to put more money into solving the problem itself — or risk having more consumers defect to rivals.

I’ll say it again: Sell Dell.

So Dell announces a luxury line — its Lexus — with better computers and better service: “But Dell says the real feeling of luxury will come from its customer service. Buyers of the XPS laptops will be connected with a customer service representative within five minutes of calling…” Which is to say that all the rest of Dell’s customers get crappy customer service and long waits and that in its other models, it doesn’t sell quality and only sells price.

I’d pretty much left behind the Dell Hell but, what the hell…

My son still has a Dell laptop (what kind of father am I?) and he had two hardware problems. Since we paid for the super-duper home service, the technician came to our house. But — surprise, surprise — Dell sent him with the wrong parts. He got on the phone to Dell — demanding to know whether he was talking to America, by the way — and got the runaround and they hung up on him twice. He’s their guy.

So I’m not alone.

: But wait: Dell is opening a new customer service center in Oklahoma.

I was pretty amazed when I read this from Daniel Gross in Slate on Dell’s many problems, including the ones I caused them:

Dell had the bad luck to tick off a very powerful blogger. The company is justly known for its fantastic customer service. But any time you engage in tens of millions of customer contacts, there are bound to be errors. It was Dell’s misfortune that one of those errors affected a person with a huge megaphone, blogger Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis’ blow-by-blow account of his Dell hell has become an Internet phenomenon.

I was going to reply but Scott Rosenberg at Salon said it best:

Sorry, I don’t buy it. Set aside the idea that Dell is “justly known” for great service. Known to whom? This sounds like boilerplate from an analyst’s report or the company’s own marketing literature. I’ve never bought a Dell computer. But in my circles and reading — an admittedly totally subjective smattering of hearsay, but what else does “known for” mean? — Dell is known for being a giant corporation that hands over its customer service to bored, ill-treated, underpaid people desperate to move on to better jobs.

Still, that’s not really the point. Maybe you have a circle of friends who have all had peachy-keen customer-support experiences with their Dell boxes. The point is, Jarvis’s experience was not a fluke; if it had been, his tale would never have made waves.

Gross is wrong because what gave Jarvis’s complaint wasn’t the size of the blogger’s megaphone — it was the chord of recognition his message struck with his readers.

Right. It wasn’t my problem that made news. It was the pile-on in comments and blog links — not to mention the many desparate emails I’m getting, which I’m powerless to deal with — from fellow victims that made this a story.

Besides, Dell isn’t known for its customer service. Dell is known for being cheap.