 I
deliberately waited a couple of weeks after my dreadful experience
trying to get my new Dell 5150 fixed, partly to calm down and partly to
make sure the problem has in fact been fixed. This is a long and
convoluted story but because it's embarrassing, and not particularly
amusing, I'm not going to tell it in detail. Suffice it to say that it
involved:
- Four courier trips by two different courier companies delivering parts between my house and the Dell Parts Depot
- Four trips by me to a company called Solectron, located North ofToronto, to which Dell subcontracts technical service work
- Six lengthy conversations with Dell India, which handles the diagnosis of technical problems for non-corporate customers
- Thirty bewildering e-mail messages trying to get answers
online, only to be told to RTFM, and then that Canadian non-corporate
customers cannot get service by e-mail, and must instead phone Dell
India
- One infuriating conversation with Dell 'Customer Care', a
total oxymoron, with a guy who spoke English with no accent but I have
no idea where he was located (he refused to say)
The final diagnosis was that a defective $5 AC adapter shorted out not one, but two motherboards. Total cost to Dell for parts, delivery and labour: about $2,000, and even that is less than the value of my
time spent trying to get the problem fixed. My computer was out of
service for a week. IF I had been simply instructed to take the PC into
Solectron and wait for them to check it out, I would have been in and
out in 30 minutes and the cost would have been minimal.
Since I'm copying Dell on this (that is if I can actually find an
address of someone in authority to send it to) rather than tell you all
the things that they did wrong (and that, acting on their instruction,
I did wrong), I'll describe instead how Dell could dramatically improve
their customer service processes.
But before I do, I want to be clear about something: The
people working at the grassroots level at Dell and its outsourcers are
all hard-working, polite people doing their best to do their job. All
the fuck-ups (and they were legion) were directly caused by Dell
management policies, and can only be rectified by Dell management.
OK. Here's what Dell needs to do to change the 'customer experience' from ghastly, interminable nightmare to quick-and-bearable:
- Provide single-point-of-contact for each service issue.
Solectron was wonderful -- far more knowledgeable than those
disembodied voices at the end of the telephone. The first time I
phoned, or e-mailed, with a problem, Solectron should have handled the
issue. Yeah, I know Dell doesn't trust their outsourcer not to pad the
bill, especially on warrantee work. That's one of the problems with
outsourcing.
- When you tell the customer to take/send in their computer, tell them to send it all
in. I was told by Dell India to take everything out and just send in
the shell. This is the lawyers talking, and more distrust of the
outsourcer. This is just plain bad policy.
- If you're going to use people in India to do diagnostics, for pete's sake trust them. More than half
of the very long time that these telephone conversations took was dead
air -- while the tech service people apologetically put me repeatedly
on hold to get 'permission' to send me a $5 part, or to check with
their boss that it was OK for me to take/send in my computer for
warrantee service. It's outrageous that customers have to wait on line
while employees are treated like children and second-guessed by their
superiors.
- Educate your people about the individual policies of your
outsourcers. Solectron Canada has an in-by-10, out-by-5 same-day repair
policy. The people at Dell didn't know about it, and that cost me an
extra day.
- Give your outsourcers a full supply of repair parts, and
let them sell parts retail as well. When the outsourcers have to
requisition parts from Dell and then wait for them to come in, that
unnecessarily delays customer service. If Dell had the decency to
provide loaners to customers who are without their machines more than
24 hours, this might not be so bad. But they don't, so delays just add
insult to injury.
- Just get rid of 'Customer Care', and provide a proper complaint department instead. The so-called Customer Care department has absolutely no authority to do anything for customers. Their sole job is to explain and apologize for Dell's idiotic policies, including the five above. They are instructed never to give out their full names, and never to give out names, addresses or contact information of anyone higher up in Dell.
In other words, these lackeys are paid to run interference, stonewall
and prevent aggrieved customers, and customers who have ideas for
improvement, from any contact with the people in Dell who could resolve
or act on them. Staggering arrogance, disgraceful and classic
corporatist contempt for customers. Every customer has the right to
complain, in writing, about bad service or bad products. And in the
process to copy the regulatory authorities so that if the complaints
are frequent, the conduct of the company will be investigated.
Dell just reported record earnings last week. Michael Dell and his
fellow executives each raked in over $3 million last year, excluding
the huge value of their stock options. Meanwhile, according to Consumer
Reports, about one laptop in four has a serious problem in its
short shelflife -- that's about 100,000,000 units with at least one
important defect. One in twelve has problems in the first month of
ownership, and one in eight has a problem that makes the computer
completely inoperable -- that's 25,000,000 people per year temporarily
unable to do their job while the tech support people fiddle with
defects in their employers' products. Customer satisfaction ranks just
around 50%, the second lowest ratings of any consumer products the
magazine tracks. There is a large increase in complaints about
offshored tech support in the past year.
The big seven produce about 200,000,000 new computers each
year, which on average end up in landfill sites in four to five years
(the fastest growing and one of the most toxic components of our
garbage problem). The vast majority are made from shoddy materials in
third world countries like China, Malaysia and Singapore, by workers
who get paid a few dollars a day, using components that wreak
environmental havoc from slipshod and reckless mining and refining
techniques. Why bother making a quality product
when it will be garbage so soon anyway? And if you work with Microsoft
et al, you can guarantee that even if it isn't technically obsolete by
the time it falls apart, it will be unable to power the next bloated
versions of the software by then anyway. I would have added a point 7
above -- "build a high quality product" -- but even I'm not that naive.
My new AC adapter works fine, but still fits loosely in the slot at the
back of the machine, and usually falls out when I lift up the machine
to put it on my lap. If they built cars this sloppily we'd all be dead.
This is what happens when a company gets big,
and is rewarded for 'maximizing profit for shareholders' instead of
producing a quality product and providing quality service. It's what
happens when a company's management becomes removed, and then isolated,
from its customers. It's what happens when an oligopoly of seven
companies corners the market and offers essentially identical,
mediocre, overpriced products. It's what we get when we fail to hold
corporations accountable and responsible for what they do. It's what we
get when we accept the corporatist propaganda that the unregulated
'market' will always produce the best possible solution and value for
customers, and that government regulation is inherently bad.
We should know better. We should expect better. We deserve better.
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