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Thoughts on Dell and their PR woes
6 comments- IT TOPICS:Hardware, Management
Dell has been generating a lot of negative press recently, at least among bloggers. You can read about it here, here, and here.
Have to say that my experiences with Dell support have been mostly positive, aside from a few experiences. Click here, and here to see past posts I've made about Dell tech support.
One thing about the negative support threads that seems to be common is the fact that they appear to be mostly calling Dell's consumer support, whereas I call Dell's corporate support.
I typically have very short wait times and am able to get replacement parts shipped to me in 10 minutes or less, depending on the issue.
For instance, an attorney's D600 developed hard drive issues this morning. I called Dell, gave the tech person my info, told her that I needed a new hard drive, summarized the steps I had already taken and gave her the error message that the Dell diagnostics was reporting during the read test. Bam, a minute later, she told me the part would be shipped and gave me my tracking numbers. Call didn't last longer than 10 or 15 minutes.
Last week, I called Dell about a problem we were having with our M5200N workgroup printers. We use them for our letterhead printers and they sometimes have problems printing on the rougher letterhead, bond paper and envelopes. Again, hold time was very short, I spoke to a support person and gave them the particulars. They had me put in a new toner cartridge. That didn't solve the issue, but did make it better. They scheduled for a support tech to come out and repair it.
He couldn't make it out until yesterday, at which time he came out and replaced one of the rollers as well as order a replacement power unit from Dell. The replacement came out today and actually made the problem worse. So they ended up ordering a new printer from Dell which should be here tomorrow.
Not sure that it will solve the issue as the M5200Ns don't seem to be able to print to rough paper as well as our HP Laserjet 1850s do, but we shall see. At least they are trying to make things right.
Getting back to whether Dell is listening or not...yes, I think that they are listening...at least to their corporate customers. Which I think is a growing trend in the industry. Who does Microsoft, Adobe and others force to use activation and other DRM systems? Their corporate licensing customers? No...why would they want to do that when corporate customers buy their software in huge lots? Why not squeeze as much money as you can out of consumers...a loose group of individuals with one thing in common, the need to purchase products, but who do not usually form groups large enough to bother companies like Dell.
Until consumers are able to organize against companies like Dell, they won't listen. It's simple economics, the groups with the most money have the largest voice.
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