Dell Customer Service Catastrophe

IanFogg | May 27, 2008, 04:19 PM

Every company has faults and problems with products. What defines a company reputation is how they handle and resolve those problems when they occur.

Last Monday my Dell laptop died. The Dell support line rapidly diagnosed a hardware fault and scheduled an engineer visit. So far, pretty good.

From that point on things deteriorated dramatically:

1. On Friday the engineer failed to show. I'd re-jigged my schedule to work from home especially.

2. When I phoned, Dell said they knew the visit would not take place (but hadn't notified me).

3. I complained and escalated it. They refused to extend my warranty by way of compensation for lost time and inconvenience of the laptop breaking in the first place.

4. Today I worked from home again, again inconvenient: an engineer called, replaced the circuit board, but the laptop still had faults. Apparently, the technician only carries one part with him.

5. I complained again, the tech person I spoke to had no record of the previous complaint.

6. They've scheduled another visit tomorrow, but again will only arrive with the one part they think is faulty. If it's not, Dell spends more cash on another visit, and I have to move my life around for a fourth day.

So, the laptop is still broken, and Dell have such little confidence in the reliability of their products they will not extend a customer warranty to placate a customer. After all, if the laptop doesn't break again, a warranty extension costs Dell nothing.

Equally badly for Dell, they are unnecessarily increasing their costs. If the engineer that arrives tomorrow only has the one part, and again it doesn't fix the laptop, then Dell will have to send another engineer out (third actual visit, fourth scheduled visit). Engineer visits must be extremely costly for Dell.

Even worse, Dell proved unprepared to budge on the parts issue when I spoke with them this afternoon. So, they are as inflexible on this as they are on warranty extensions, even for customers that have had a poor experience and complain.

For anyone that wants to see the problem, again it appears I'm not alone, there is a video of the symptoms here which I found during today's three hour engineer visit (!). The fun starts about a minute in.

Sorry for the long post. I'd delayed writing about this as I had anticipated a happy ending today. Unfortunately, even Dell engineers believe in trilogies. I just hope they don't plan to copy Spielberg, Lucas, and Ford and do a fourth.