wayne on January 10, 2008
I recently made a call to Dell support for help with an Inspiron system I purchased from them just about 6 months ago. Just last night I found my system frozen, so I simply rebooted the system. My system rebooted and I got the bios post screen as is normal with rebooting. It showed the pretty Dell logo, what bios version I am running and stayed there for some time. Then some time turned into minutes...then I realized I have a more serious problem than a simple reboot would rectify.
I tapped my F2 and F12 keys a few times and received no response. Hmm...Num Lock? Nope, no love there either, no lights going blink-blink in rhythm with my tapping the Num Lock key. Shoot!
I'm still on the Bios splash screen, my keyboard and mouse are not getting any juice to light them up to make them work.
I proceeded to test things. I tried my keyboard and mouse in another system, nothing wrong there, they both worked fine which tells me it is not the keyboard or mouse. It's the USB ports they are plugged into.
Repeated reboot attempts continue to stall on the BIOS splash screen, same as before. So with the problem narrowed down a bit, and absolutely no way to really debug the issue beyond what I have already learned, I reluctantly called Dell support for assistance.
My call to support was a complete fiasco. Because of the hour I spent on the phone with Dell Support, I decided to make it a top ten list, so here it is.
The Top 10 Reasons to Avoid Dell Support
- You will never get someone without a thick accent - It seems that every time I call Dell Support, I get an Indian from India with such a thick accent that by default, you know you will be on the phone a while translating your good English to their bad English. Don't think I am a racist or anything like that. I appreciate the India off-shore development and support model and have many Indian friends. The off-shore model saves a ton of money for a company. But the flip-side is potentially more damaging in my opinion. I left my call wishing I had gone with a different computer vendor that has a person that speaks my language natively, not secondarily.
- Have your mind ready, when they say to de-plug, that actually means unplug (again, a translation issue that I found rather amusing).
- Forget calling if you don't have your order number, asset service tag number or customer number. They will hunt and hunt for hours looking for you by name, by address, and by phone and come up empty handed and unable to service you. My call was 30 minutes of the support person searching for my account and system information by my name, phone and address, none of which yielded any results. so much so that he was saying that I would have to call back when I get the appropriate information available. 30 minutes of waiting on the phone while they simply try to find information on me! That's really sad. I ultimately had to hack my way into my account on the Dell web site to view my order history and provide support with an order number. Guess what, my account information was there instantly.
- Prepare to be over-patronized. Every sentence ends with 'Thank you sir' or 'Very good sir', 'I understand sir'. It's like a butlers speech habits with a wealthy, over-bearing snob of an employer. I understand they need to friendly, courteous and what not, but they go way over board to the point of making one sick. Perhaps it is the culture (they have a fantastically strong work-ethic which plays into this too I'm sure).
- It will take you a minimum of 5 minutes to simply get a human being on the phone. I must say that the voice recognition they have while navigating callers to their appropriate destination worked really well, but you still have to navigate it. Some automation works for the company, others for its customers. The call routing features companies use today are solely for the benefit of the company and provide little value to customers who know they need to speak to a human.
- If you have purchase a couple systems from Dell like I have, you will probably make the poor support person confused. They could not remember that I had called about the Inspiron system, and the XPS laptop, nor the Dimension desktop. I constantly reminded him that we are talking about my Inspiron.
- It sometimes take multiple iterations of explaining the issue for it to sink in. When I said there was no power going to my USB keyboard and mouse, he responded with 'Can you please remove the batteries that are in the keyboard'. Excuse me? USB keyboard, hello? Not once did I ever mention wireless...
- I spent over an hour on this call and ended up hanging up on them. I went through several 'try this and try that' scenarios, all with the same result as to the reason I called in the first place. For the more technical of users out there that call in, this is incredibly frustrating. I know my way around a computer quite well, yet I am forced to go through the 'Unplug the system and lets wait for 5 minutes' to try it again. Even though I told them that I had tried all these things, I should not have said I am happy to try them again, because I wasn't when we finished.
- Last thing you want happening is to listen on the phone for 5 minutes while we wait for the power to drain from the computer after unplugging it to test some scenario. Try listening to a support person breathe on the phone for 5 minutes...not fun, quite boring.
- They use another country for support.
Ok, so number 10 is cheap, I know. I really didn't have a 10th item, so perhaps there is someone out there that has one I can throw in there.
I've decided to find another company to buy my systems from as a result. Hopefully I'll have better things to write about them. Any recommendations?
