Survey: Dell customer satisfaction unsatisfactory

[Nilfennasion]

Best way is to support your local outlet and buy the parts from them. That's what I did when I upgraded to this Athlon chip, anyway. There are some parts I never like to install myself, but aside from that, it's likely to net you a better deal than buying a whole system prefab from a big manufacturer, especially if the reported quality of Dell's parts is anything to go by.

[sillyfaget]

I've only called Dell once (for my mom's handheld), and it was terrible. I was on the phone for an hour, and they had a very confusing phone menu. I finally got a hold of someone in the correct department, and he could barely speak english. He ended up hanging up on me, so I got onto Dell's website and tried the email support. I never got an answer. I replied to the email like the instructions said to, and I still never got a reply. It's a terrible support system.

[Darth Paris]

I bought a dell PC at the begining of the year. They sent me the wrong software and I spent 4 hours on the phone with them over a $10 difference for piece of software. They said they could n't send it to me unless I purchesed it again. Dell customer service equals a pain in the ass.

[mike1061]

Dell sucks.
I thought I would add my 2 cents. Dell sucks period. I bought one about 2 years ago to transfer my VHS tapes to DVD. I, to this date do not have one done. Nobody at Dell had any idea how do anything except delete and reinstall programs. Hardware blamed software, and software blamed hardware. Did I mention I spent over $4,000 on the dam thing. Though I didn't actuley count, I have to have over 100 hours into the dam thing too. It could be 200.
Dell sucks.
My brother works for Dell, but I could never go through that shit again.
Mike

[Kaitan]

Oh boy. Dell sucks.

I've got a Inspiron 8500 laptop that I purchased from them over a year ago. The thing was supposed to come with a DVD+R drive (which, technically, it did) but it has never worked since I got the thing. I read over on the Dell support boards that many (read: dozens) people who got this same drive with their laptops also had similar problems with it failing right out of the box. Since that time, I've made 6 seperate phone calls to Dell tech support, even referencing the thread on their own support board, to try and get mine replaced. Now, I'm not a computer newbie as I've been using them for twenty years now, so I know for a FACT that reinstalling windows and/or their crappy Roxio EZ-CRAP isn't going to fix a hardware problem! On one of the phone calls I made, I got a VERY irate person whom I could barely understand literally YELLING at me because the problem was MY fault for using 2.4X media in a 2X drive. WTF? I tried to explain to him that with DVD+R, there IS NO 2X, only 2.4X but he continued to be irate so I told him politely where to stick it and hung up. So here I am, over a year later, with a $3100 laptop that doesn't function properly.

Yeah. Dell sucks.

[burnman99]

I've had mixed support from Dell. I bought a Pentium II 266 for about $2,000 in 1998. After about 6 months, the silly thing kept crashing over & over. Since i was pretty much a neophyte, i called Dell tech support only to get a hostile condescending tech, who basically told me to reformat, since "IF he couldn't get Windows working, nobody can". When i went to reformat it, i lost power and then got errors on the format command. Since i was now convinced the thing was completely worthless, i called support one more time to see where to ship it to when the other tech support person actually talked me thru a machine language command that reset my hard drive so i could reformat it! It was the best tech support i've ever seen. These days, i'm not a newbie & am A+ Certified with a good deal of experience, so i build my own and don't buy prebuilt stuff. I also managed to fix my sister's audio problem with her Dell over the phone when they couldn't even get thru to dell's long waits for tech support. Moral of the story: Either fix it yourself or get the extension of a good tech who can!

Have fun stormin' the castle!

Rog

[BodaZoffa]

I've had to call Dell support on 4 different occasions. They were helpful each time, but on 2 occassions I was put on hold for over 45 minutes.

My biggest complaint..... I can't understand a frigg'in word they are saying! Move this back to the good ol USA!


Boda

[§kipTracer65]

just opened my morning paper to see that 3 dell employees were sacked and faced the wrath of the courts here in ireland 1 for dealing and 2 for smoking canibus on the job, that might go a long way to explaining some issues lmao

[Faustus]

BTW I mentioned earlier in the thread that the co I work for does some of the support for Dell that remains in the US. Well I found out that contract has been pulled. When I asked someone outside smoking from the contract where its going he said "I dunno, India I think..."

If true now ALL Dell support for customers and Small Bus. will be there.

The only US support left will be people with a business relationship with dell itself.

[JohnnyCNote]

Didn't they make a big deal a while back about having moved business tech support back to the US?

For Dell, Indian call center failure a lesson

Dell admits it has "learned its lesson" after being forced to drop its Indian call center last year following customer complaints about the quality of service.

The call center operation for the OptiPlex desktops and Latitude laptops was moved back to the United States. Dell CIO Randy Mott said in an interview that the Bangalore center was unable to deal satisfactorily with the volume of calls generated by the rapid growth of those product lines.

"In that example we were not as efficient as we wanted to be," he said. "We were growing very quickly in that (consumer) segment. It got a little ahead of us. We took the decision to get it back under control. Our customers expect more from Dell than other companies, and we weren't meeting those (expectations)."

So much for that...

[Faustus]

Like I said, the only support in the US are what the call "Relation ship customers"

[Kaitan]

Oh boy. Dell sucks.

I've got a Inspiron 8500 laptop...

<rant removed>

...that doesn't function properly.

Yeah. Dell sucks.

I hate quoting myself, but here is the drive I'm talking about, FYI.

https://www.videohelp.com/dvdwriters.php?DVDnameid=225&Search=Search&list=

[TBoneit]

I'm still using my 4 year old Dell (866MHz PIII). I swapped out the video card, all of the optical drives (it came with CD-RW and a real crappy DVD-ROM), added memory, hard drives...etc. and it's been working fine. When I did have to call support, I was clearly talking to someone in India. They were helpful, but I ended up figuring it out for myself.

I probably won't be getting another Dell though. I don't have room for another desktop, and I really like Toshiba laptops.

If you are on this forum you may be better served with a desktop since you are here to learn how to do movies to VCD/SVCD/DVD ? and the drives are much easier & cheaper & varied & fatser and readily available for desktops. And for backing up DVDs then a desktop hands down. Many laptops will slow down when encoding video. Encoding video runs the cpu at 100% generating heat and many laptops are not designed for cooling the cpu for long term 100% usage so they step down the speed.

The Toshiba is laptop is Ok, however I tried last week to get a repair part for one that is off warranty, no sale, they won't sell repair parts,(reading between the lines now) bring it in and pay us the big bucks for the repair.
BTW same problem with Gateway, no sale parts.

All it needs is a new CPU fan. Of course it is a laptop and not a standard part easily gotten. And whats with HPs prices... We had to pay over $100 for a cpu fan for a HP laptop as they would only seel it as part of a whole assembly with 2 fans, heat sink & heat pipes etc. I don't think these newer laptops are going to be as durable or relaible or as inexpensive to repair as desktops are. My two cents.

Do I have a laptop? Yes, did I try using it for encoding video to parallel my desktop and be able to increase my throughut. Runs way to hot. So now I have given it to mom who uses it to play solitaire, (decent machine 2.2 Ghz, 15", dvd, 4 usb, firewire, parallel, ps2, floppy, and my preference a touchpad, mobile ATI 7500 vga, etc.) But runs so hot
encoding I didn't want to burn it up so......

Good luck