Tales of Customer Service

July 5, 2005

Big-name blogger Jeff Jarvis is engaged in a public relations battle with Dell Computers. As so often happens with customer service and tech support, his case has been handled badly. After bitching about it in his blog for days, he sent email directly to Dell's VP of Marketing (a time-honored technique that I suggested years ago). That got the desired results, though it's hard to be sure whether he got the attention simply because he figured out the VP's email address, or because he's Jeff Jarvis.

By the tenor of most comments on his blog, Dell's customer service in the US is legendarily bad. Which seems to be true of most US high-tech companies; can anyone give me an example of tech support they've been happy with?

Meanwhile, I've been having a pretty good experience with Dell support and customer service here in Italy. My desktop computer melted down (almost literally) a few weeks ago. I spent time on the phone, swapping RAM around etc. under their direction, and installing a replacement video card they sent me. The problems changed, but there were still problems. A Dell technician came out to the house in Lecco three times, swapping more parts, before they finally concluded that they couldn't fix it and had to simply replace the entire computer.

Since Dell no longer makes the Dimension 8200 model, this means an upgrade to the 8400. I successfully bargained with the customer service rep to get the top-of-the-line video card for this model (which seemed only fair: I'd paid 400 euros extra to have the then-best video card in the 8200), and the hard disk is bigger because they no longer make the 120 GB size. They're even giving me a bit more RAM than I had before. So I'm getting a far better computer, for free, thanks to the three-year, on-site-service warranty I bought on the original machine.

All this without begging, threatening, or pleading. The technicians I spoke with were well-informed (including having the records of all my previous calls at their fingertips) and helpful, and they tried to work around limitations such as not being available during evening hours nor by email (these are faults of policy, about which I have duly complained to Dell via their customer satisfaction form).

What conclusions to draw from this? Apparently Dell Europe is doing something right in customer service, and Dell US should take a closer look. I would like to know myself where the difference lies, as there may be lessons there that I could apply to my future customer service management work for TVBLOB.

July 9, 2005

Well, they did manage to screw up a little. I waited (not always personally at home) for days for UPS to come pick up the old computer, and also began to wonder where the new one was. The customer service rep insisted they had come to my house several times, but there was always someone here, and if UPS doesn't find you, they usually leave a note. Finally we figured out that they had been given our old address in Milan, which Dell had on record as I had purchased the original computer from there. It never occurred to me that they would have made this mistake, since a technician had been to our new home in Lecco three times, but whoever handed over the order to customer service put in the old address.

So the new computer finally arrived yesterday, and is working fine. There are a few hiccups: the extra hard disk I had bought for the old one won't work in it; they're using some new kind of connector now. And the fancy new video card is so huge it covers two slots, of which this model has fewer to begin with, so there's no room for my firewire card. This means I'll have to use the laptop to capture video from the digital video camera, and transfer it over to the desktop using the 250 GB external hard disk I bought to back up the old Dell hard disk. Computers. There's always something.