I have been in the IT industry for 33 years. I am vice presidents of a well known and respected college and one of the departments under me is IT Services. I live customer service; every day is another day serving faculty, staff, students, visitors, vendors, and people inquiring of the college.
I know what customer service is and what DELL entitles as "Customer Service" is in no-way, shape or form customer service. I personally know several people that have gone down that dark murky slippery slope into DELL-HELL… one person simply unplugged the DELL computer they had just purchased, bought another computer and use the DELL as a stand for the new computer. Another person purchased a DELL and has literally been lost in DELL-HELL trying to get memory for the computer.
To begin with she wasn’t given the appropriate amount of memory required by the motherboard manufacturer. This of course generated a call to the DELL Support desk. Which in turn, and intentionally, drives up their call volume statistics giving the appearance they are needed? She called three different times before she asked me to step in and communicate her concerns for her.
When I called DELL Support and asked for a history of the issue the DELL representative related there was no documentation to indicate my friend had ever called. After an hour and a half on the phone, and I literally mean one and a half hours… 90 minutes… I got DELLs infamous dial tone, the phone mysteriously disconnected, and I had to call back pushing up their call stats yet again… The DELL rep finally agreed to send a memory dim to compensate for the dim that was never in the computer in the first place.
This is nothing though listen to this; this is where DELL really excels and lives up to all of my expectations. The person here in town representing DELL that received the memory dimm from the support center called and we came to an agreement as to a time and date he could come over and put in the memory dimm in. On two separate occasions he has failed to show up with no call, no notice, no warning, and no excuse the next day… nothing.
When I finally did get the memory dimm from him I discovered the dimm did not work in the computer, was bad, now needs to be returned… Ha, Ha, HA… Even as skeptical as I am about DELL, even I could not believe this was happening so I brought the dimm back to the college and had one of my techs test it on a dimm tester. I learned the dimm is failing the VDD core test, it just means the dimm is bad. At this point my friend is now so frustrated and discouraged she is physically ill.
And by the way, after exhausting all of this energy the warranty has expired… I can’t wait to see what happens next… she is trying to return the computer.Buy a Gateway or go to Best Buy or Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club or maybe a local person near you can build a computer for you…BUT save your self hours, days, weeks, months and years of frustration… stay far from DELL-Hell.
