Thursday, July 03, 2008

Dell in the Limelight

Recently a law suit was filed and argued before the New York Supreme Court on behalf of "numerous" customers of Dell Computer Corp. who claimed they were ignored by Dell's Customer Service department. This suit was eventually concluded in favor of the plaintiffs and Dell has been forced to make restitution to these people by the High Court.

As someone who has been in the personal computer business for many years and has had many hundreds of experiances with Dell Computer Corp. I find the recent ruling of New York Supreme Court Justice Teresi offensive in the extreme. The law suit itself is insulting on many levels.

Dell's marketing practices of advertising a $300.00 computer that you could never in reality actually buy do indeed smack of the classic "bait and switch" as alleged. And I agree that such tactics are bogus and should be stampted out, so for this portion of the complaint I do agree.

Where Attorney General Cuomo looses me is when he asserts that "For too long at Dell, the promise of customer service was a bait and switch that left thousands of people paying for essentially no service at all." I beg to differ. We all wish we could provide our customers with the level of service that Dell Computer Corp. is famous for providing, moreover it is this industry leading customer service that has made Dell the giant it is, not their computers.

There is nothing special about a Dell computer, it is a collection of components built by other companies assembled together in a (usually) attractive container. Dell manufactures nothing. What sets Dell apart from the rest of the computer industry is customer service after the sale.

Yes, some times the wait on the phone can be long, that is not because they are sitting back and ignoring people though, it's because they are busy. It happens. My personal record for a call to Dell Tech Support was 87 minutes, but on the other end I have been on and off in as little as 6 minutes as well. The average is closer to 15 minutes, and I have placed literally hundreds of calls to Dell over the years.

But the phone is not the only way to contact Dell. They also have a nifty on-line chat with a live technician that works very much like a phone call. This is a great tool provided you have the ability to get to the internet while working to solve your problem.

Besides Tech Support you can e-mail Customer Support and expect an answer within 48 hours, that is not unreasonable. In fact it seems to be the standard for a response from any company.

Did Dell need to re-evaluate it's marketing values? Probably. Is there something fundenetally wrong with their cusomer service that warrents a class-action law suit? No chance. The computer industry has been handing awards to Dell for top notch customer service for more than two decades and will probably continue to do so.

The result in New York does not shake our faith in the rock of the hardware world.