I’m curious how other folks are getting along with Dell support lately. Many of my clients are becoming increasingly disillusioned with Dell’s support. Not only do they not like trying to communicate with the nice, but difficult to understand phone tech support, but they also are not impressed with the onsite service.
Today, one of my long time customers had to have a hard drive replaced. The tech who showed up was in his house less than 15 minutes. He screwed in the new drive, started the machine and said good luck. This doesn’t seem like good service to me. Do you have any stories about tech support from Dell or any other manufacturer?
Related articles:
Loading ...
,
I dont use onsite support, but besides the waiting time i have had good phone support from dell. last year my laptop needed a new motherboard, and since it was still under warranty they had a shipping container sent, it was repaired and sent back in a matter of days. however just hours after recieving it the exact same thing happened again and it needed another motherboard, i expect this is a very rare anomoly, but they fixed it up right again. dell dosent suit all my needs, so i wont be getting another, but i am satisfied with the support they give.
I had 11 month old Dell desktop when the harddrive failed. I found I had to know almost as much as the techs did in order to get the problems solved. The harddrive was replaced, but all that was required of the tech person who installed it was to install the OS and nothing else. I had to go by phone to get the proper drivers etc. I needed a driver for my broadband network and I finally got a tech who knew what they were doing. They sent the tiny URL to another email address so I could download it and installed it myself. Dell employees only allowed to use the registered email address which didn’t help me because I couldn’t access the internet. The tech found a way around that that finally solved my problem. I guess you just need to get to the right person.
Ahhh…a place to rant about Dell support. Where do I start? Until about a year and a half ago, I always bought Dell Dimensions for my business and home use and had good experiences. Then, I bought a batch of 5 at one time, and the hard drives failed in each one within six months. (Probably just my bad luck & I know that Dell doesn’t actually build hard drives). The drives were all replaced by Dell under warranty, but I went round n’ round with tech support, customer service, sales, etc…and they were all very apathetic toward my lost time & hair over the whole situation. Since I have a local contract IT guy, I only opted to let Dell send out a tech for one of the drives. He did about what you said (and pretty much as I expected) – slapped the new drive in, waved “goodbye”, and was out of the driveway before I could turn the power-strip back on.
Anyway, none of this was a learning experience for me about onsite support, but through this (and subsequent nightmares), I have learned some other things about Dell:
- Dell doesn’t seem to much care about the “Dimension” line of desktops. The components, construction, and (especially) support are minimal and you take a gamble on getting a good machine. Since those 5 aforementioned hard drives, I’ve been done with Dimensions.
- You are much better off spending a couple of hundred dollars more to bump up to the “Optiplex” line (or the XPS line, if you want to go really crazy). From the moment you take it out of the box & turn it on, you can tell it’s a better built machine. Also, the warranty period is 3-years and Dell tech support seems to actually care when you call with a problem or question on an Optiplex.