December 11, 2008
The Facts
Over the past couple of years, Dell has heard from an untold number of outraged customers about the lousy technical support encountered when trying to deal with foreign technicians that can barely speak English. Industry insiders point to this as being a large part of Dell’s decline in sales. Now Dell has announced they will “fix” that problem. For a fee, ($12.99 per month or $99 per year) Dell now guarantees that you will get someone who speaks “American” when you call for technical support.
My View
Let me start out by saying that the last five computers I’ve purchased were Dell computers, so you can’t accuse me of being anti-Dell. However, as a Dell owner, I have a fair amount of experience in dealing with their foreign technical support. If you send an email, the first sentence in their reply is much like what you get when seeking technical support from Norton; “I understand your problem”. And when you call for technical support, they spend the first five minutes trying to literally understand your simplified description of the problem. And the first fix they all offer is “let’s re-install the software”.
So now Dell has finally recognized the problem, and they want to fix it for us. Unfortunately for us Dell owners, Dell sees a way to make an additional profit on this. For a fee, Dell will guarantee us we will get an “American” speaking and “American” language understanding person on the other end of the phone. Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman said “we’ve heard from customers that it’s hard to understand a particular accent and that they couldn’t understand the instructions they were getting. This illustrates Dell’s commitment to customer choice.” Ok, so let’s get this straight; Dell is willing to stand behind their commitment that comes with the purchase price of a computer, but only for additional cash. And what’s the biggest thing Dell hypes when buying a computer from them? The infamous “extended warranty”, which covers both parts & labor, and technical support. Well, in all fairness to Dell, I guess they didn’t guarantee us that anyone on their end would be able to “understand” our technical questions or that we would be able to “understand” the technical instructions we get.
Here I could say that when Dell has lost enough of their business to other manufacturers they will really get the message. Unfortunately, most of the popular brand name manufacturers’ do the same thing. So all we’re left with is “thank you Dell for finally recognizing our real technical problem”.
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