DELL - WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE EVER?

redrua

Hey,

After being a happy and loyal Dell laptop consumer for the last few years I was excited with my new Dell Inspiron Mini 11z. A light weight little powerhouse of a laptop. And for the first 10 weeks it ran like a dream until......

1. Went to use SD card in unit and no joy. Tried several cards, rang support (you know the 47 minute on hold calls) and repeated all the steps with the guy on the phone that I had just done before contacting support. Sent my laptop back to be serviced and waited 9 days for a return.

BAD IDEA TO SEND OFF FOR REPAIR!!!!! Got 11z back and was horrified at the state of it. Key board not replaced properly. Large raised bump in centre of keyboard and actual holed drilled into base of unit to put in screws. NO SCREWS in the ACTUAL screw holes, Screen malfunction (leeched all colour during start-up boot). Whizzing noise when on, NO SOUND from speakers and worst of all....THEY HAD NOT FIXED THE ORIGINAL FAULT WITH THE SD CARD!!!

So called Dell and waited yet another 45mins to talk to a "technician".

After he established I was neither lying or had not done this damage myself he agreed to fob me off to customer service. Dell told me that they NOT offer an exchange on any unit (even though they had damaged it beyond in my opinion reasonable travel damage).

So they sent me out a repair technician. This technician actually was very good and knew what he was about. He replaced......LCD SCREEN, KEYBOARD, MOTHERBOARD (which had an actual screw drilled through it), USB and SD CARD SLOTS!!!! I couldn't believe how much they had screwed it up!!!

NOW today I hook my 11z up to my Philips LCD as I have done many times to watch a movie and THERE IS NO SOUND OUTPUT THROUGH THE HDMI!!!

All software is in order. I have updated drivers and test bar shows sound being produced. I can only surmise that the sound card has not been connected to the HDMI output.

Yet another 47 minute phone call on hold and 45 seconds talking to an agent and I am told to call back tomorrow.

I cannot believe that a company like dell is so unprofessional and inefficient in dealing with what was originally a very small fault.

This post will be reproduced on every single online forum I can find to warn people away from dealing with Dell.

Customer experience with Dell out of 10? On this particular Laptop? I would have to give a big fat ZERO!!!

ytareh

Terrible story ,can only imagine the gorilla who was working on your netbook first time round -sending it back to you in that state ...I hope their quality control can weed him out .Sad thing is companies like this probably have worked out an 'optimal' rate of pi55ing off customers to maximise their profits .Wasnt it in the film Fight Club they said that if a car company will spend one cent less in paying off dead relatives of car crashes due to a fault than in issueing a safety recall they will go that route ...

Gone Drinking

When people ask me where to buy from, i usually tell them the truth. If you go for a big company like dell, you'll save money and more than likely will be happy.. but if something goes wrong, you'll be looking at long turn around times, drawn out phone calls and general messing about.

If you go to a small computer company, you can expect higher prices, but better after sales help.

Friend of mine ordered a desktop from Dell last year, said the cd rom wasn't working from the moment they turned it on. I had a look and it turned out they hadn't connected the power cable to the cd rom. Had they not asked me, it'd have been weeks before they got it back.

These kind of things are to be expected from these companies.

matt-dublin

so what you're saying is that you cheaped out and got the basic warranty from dell. if you had upgraded your warranty when you bought the laptop that engineer would have been out to you next business day and the laptop would have been repaired straight away.

i always saym when buying from dell, splash out on the warranty, at least if something goes wrong you're not waiting weeks for your laptop to be repaired and you don't have to go through hell to get it fixed.

flyswatter

I sent my laptop away to Dell when there was a problem with the AC adaptor. 3 weeks later they sent it back with the same problem, the thing wouldn't charge. Turns out they replaced the motherboard, which I have no idea why they did. At least a technician showed up 2 days later with a new charger which fixed it so it wasn't too bad.

redrua

matt-dublin wrote: »

so what you're saying is that you cheaped out and got the basic warranty from dell. if you had upgraded your warranty when you bought the laptop that engineer would have been out to you next business day and the laptop would have been repaired straight away.

i always saym when buying from dell, splash out on the warranty, at least if something goes wrong you're not waiting weeks for your laptop to be repaired and you don't have to go through hell to get it fixed.

Hey Matt.

Maybe you should read the entire post before you comment. I did not "cheap out" as you put it. I went with the standard warranty from dell that comes with this model and have no problem not having it fixed in 24 hours. But what you're saying is that the basic warranty allows "service staff" to completly f**k up any computor that has the "cheaped out" warranty cover.

Alas if only I had spent the extra little bit for a warranty that would stop staff from drilling holes through a motherboard and instead do their job!


Thanks to everyone else. And yes over all I have been very happy with Dell. This just happens to be one job that they've screwed up but overall they do offer cheap fairly decent laptops.

matt-dublin

If you had the standard warranty it is collect and return, 10-14 days, for one year, if you had paid the extra €90 - €200 you would have had a 1-4 year next business day onsite repair. (which is the basic warranty on inspiron m11z)

so frankly i am not an idiot. I've been working in high end IT for the last 10 years, and a little extra warranty to me always seems clever. Especially since i've over 100 Dell laptops here between 1 & 4 years old all with nbd warranty and accidental damage and i don't have issues with dell.

You pay for what you get, you want standard support, you will get standard support.

I do agree that the service staff messed up your incident, but what i am saying is if you had paid the extra warranty it wouldn't have happened.

IrishTonyO

matt-dublin wrote: »

If you had the standard warranty it is collect and return, 10-14 days, for one year, if you had paid the extra €90 - €200 you would have had a 1-4 year next business day onsite repair. (which is the basic warranty on inspiron m11z)

so frankly i am not an idiot. I've been working in high end IT for the last 10 years, and a little extra warranty to me always seems clever. Especially since i've over 100 Dell laptops here between 1 & 4 years old all with nbd warranty and accidental damage and i don't have issues with dell.

You pay for what you get, you want standard support, you will get standard support.

I do agree that the service staff messed up your incident, but what i am saying is if you had paid the extra warranty it wouldn't have happened.

Matt the extended warranty merely speeds things up, does not stop them making a major mess of the repairs. Just b having the extended warranty does not mean this wouldn't have happened. PLus I agree you get what you pay for standard warranty should be a professional service and not a botch job.

redrua

I work in the electronics industry myself and have done for over seven years for a very well known European company so I am familiar with the different levels of service you get with different warranty’s. However I do not expect even at the basic level of service to have what was originally a relatively simple repair to result in having most of the parts of the machine replaced.

You may sit in your little bubble of high end warranty protection Matt but the simple fact is that regardless of the level of warranty on this computer and regardless of location of repair or turn around time on a repair it should have been fixed and not damaged further without having the original problem fixed.

matt-dublin

Their standard warranty has been terrible for years. I agree that it should be more of a professional service but unfortunatly i can recall countless posts on this and other forums in boards about the dell standard warranty, its always been a shambles.

At the same time the onsite Engineers which i believe are all JLS are very good engineers and are very quick at what they do (had them in this morning replacing two system boards actually, took him half an hour!)

But generally their collect and return service is brutal and the engineers tend to be people who don't really know what they're doing.

Also the staff on the helpdesk (which i believe for inspiron std support) is in HSC in india, and all of the questions they ask you are scripted, whereas if you buy the advanced support i believe the call centre is in scotland somewhere or cherrywood in loughlinstown depending on the laptop model and the staff there are generally decent engineers although still scripted.

matt-dublin

frankly, i don't like being called an idiot, and i believe its against boards.ie rules so i've reported your posts.

its not exactly high end warranty for and extra €90, and I agree they shouldn't have busted up your machine, all I was saying was if you had paid for the extra warranty it would probably be fixed by now.

Something will go wrong now with the machine in 12 months and you'll be giving out about the fact that you're warranty has run out etc etc etc.

redrua

Hey Matt,

Apologies for calling you an idiot. I suppose we will have to agree to disagree.

I will edit my previous posts and remove the offending comments from them.

You're right it was silly to stoop to name calling. Hopefully no hard feelings and thank you for your view on my situation.

privateBeavis

My sister had a dell laptop and had problems with it out of warrenty. So she rang up support to get help and they said they'd do a diagnostics over the phone but would cost €40. So thinking this diagnostic sounded the bizz said yes. The guy got her to press F8 (or whatever the key was) to boot up into diagnostic mode.... DONE! easy money!! €40 per key press

Anwways, they told her she'd need new disk and said it would cost about €350 to repair. I took a look at it and had it sorted in a day, just needed to reinstall windows cos installation got corrupted somehow.

IrishTonyO

privateBeavis wrote: »

My sister had a dell laptop and had problems with it out of warrenty. So she rang up support to get help and they said they'd do a diagnostics over the phone but would cost €40. So thinking this diagnostic sounded the bizz said yes. The guy got her to press F8 (or whatever the key was) to boot up into diagnostic mode.... DONE! easy money!! €40 per key press

Anwways, they told her she'd need new disk and said it would cost about €350 to repair. I took a look at it and had it sorted in a day, just needed to reinstall windows cos installation got corrupted somehow.

Yeah have to agree the telephone support is terrible. My friends often get me to ring for them as I am an IT Consultant. Anytime I ring them I tell them the problem, the steps I have taken etc. Always get put on hold, only for them to come back after 10 minutes and tell me to do something I have told them I already have done. And this is repeated over and over. I honestly think my 5 year old nephew has more tech knowledge than most on the phone lines for Dell.

seithon

Uhm Redrua.
Not to be an ass but I used to work for Sony support, In regard your issue it might just be that Windows 7 did not automatically change the sound output from speakers to HDMI.

If you want to check this just click on the windows button, in the search box type in sound, under the control panel heading it should list something just called "sound" clicking on that will bring up a panel that shows a list of possible outputs.

Their will be a green check mark beside the output currently being used so when its hooked up to the TV check this and make sure its using the HDMI output and that its not falling back to say speakers or something

I hope this helps I thought this might be better then another "yeah dell suck" comment

((oops got the name wrong ))

redrua

matt-dublin wrote: »

Something will go wrong now with the machine in 12 months and you'll be giving out about the fact that you're warranty has run out etc etc etc.

I agree that if this happens it would be entirely my fault for not extending the warranty but unfortunately this has nothing to do with the original issue I posted.

Anyway off I go to make yet another call to Dell and hopefully get the issue resolved once and for all. Thanks everyone anyway for all the different viewpoints. Altough I would still think twice about purchasing from Dell in the future. Maybe it would be easier to buy in a store. At least then I won't have to moan on a public forum.

And thanks Seithon but have already tried it. Was my first point of call when I found I was silenced. Thanks tho.

ytareh

Matt the likes of PC World and Dell screw you on the warranties ,sure why would you pay 10,20,30 or more % of the purchase cost on a warranty ...if the products are THAT unreliable theyre probably best not bought but you at least should have good tech support .These are almost as bad as the 'warranties' sold by some companies in the auto trade that dont ACTUALLY cover you for almost anything...everything is considered 'normal wear and tear'...

duckysauce

redrua wrote: »

I agree that if this happens it would be entirely my fault for not extending the warranty but unfortunately this has nothing to do with the original issue I posted.

Anyway off I go to make yet another call to Dell and hopefully get the issue resolved once and for all. Thanks everyone anyway for all the different viewpoints. Altough I would still think twice about purchasing from Dell in the future. Maybe it would be easier to buy in a store. At least then I won't have to moan on a public forum.

And thanks Seithon but have already tried it. Was my first point of call when I found I was silenced. Thanks tho.

did you get sorted , what was wrong ?

redrua

No got fed up with dealing with dell so just bought external PC speakers. €20 and a whole lot easier than another 40 or 50 min call to dell. But had a look online and most people who have had this problem say it is because the sound card is not re connected to the HDMI audio out. Ah well. Sure its almost perfect. On the plus side this is a great little PC and if I hadn't had any bother with Dell I would totally recommend it to anyone looking for a light laptop more powerful than a netbook. Thanks all.