Dell Technical Support Review November 2008
Every time I use Dell Technical support I write up my experience both good and bad. Hopefully this will help potential customers of Dell’s equipment get a feeling for the aftercare that is on offer.
In this case I had a remote customer who’s Dell Optiplex GX620 died in it’s 2nd year but had 3 years on-site warranty.
So the call was placed to Dell Technical Support on Monday 10th and as the PC was dead there was little in the way of diagnostic work to do, so the call was booked to send an engineer to site on Tuesday.
The engineer arrived at 5pm on Tuesday but one of his parts was dead on arrival so the call had to be aborted.
On Wednesday the company that Dell outsource their hardware warranty to called me. This is a company called Banctec. They said that due to a parts shortage the anticipated a repair would be about another 3 days.
I asked who was responsible for having access to the parts and Banctec said Dell.
So I contacted my old Dell Resolution manager and asked him to get someone to help and he forwarded my request onto a chap who did get involved.
I was told again due to the parts shortage that the part was due in by the end of business next Monday a full 7 days after the original call was made. This was very annoying so I started quoting the Next Business Day terms and conditions and my Dell Resolution Manager quickly pointed me to the “Subject to parts availability”. See main picture, yes he did include it in an e-mail to me in a big picture.
Link to the PDF version of the Dell Next Business Day Terms:
So I guess I’ve lost this one, I can’t fight for my customers rights if the T&C’s cover Dell for this.
However I can highlight a few salient facts.
1) Dell sent an engineer to site with Dead on Arrival Parts. If you read the T&C’s closely (Page 4) you will see they are allowed to replace with reconditioned or refurbished parts. Not exactly confidence inspiring is it?
2) Dell did not have access to more than 1 Dell Optiplex GX620 Motherboard. This model was a mainstream and popular business model. The new motherboard is coming from Holland apparently, hence the delay.
3) As you can see from their T&C’s Dell don’t really have to fix your problem in a fixed time frame.
For me this completely destroys my faith in the whole concept of Dell’s Next Business Day Warranty and with a customer base of 250 Dell Users who sleep peacefully thinking Dell won’t leave them hanging for a week. I guess they will be pretty disappointed too.
I’ve been dealing with Dell for over a decade and not once have parts availability been an issue.
Texas I think we have a problem…
