Thanks Dell, for another ‘worst customer experience of my life’
So, you may recall my ebay customer experience, which still I think ranks #1 in bad customer experience. But today I had a close second from Dell.
First, a little background: I wanted to buy a new laptop. Dean says, “Buy a Macbook from amazon.com, you get it next day with free shipping and no tax.” I say, “Naw, it’s too expensive, and I actually prefer windows — all my actual work is in Windows and Linux, and I can’t get myself used to using the mac shortcut keys.” So Dean says, “Then run windows on it.” But nooooooo, I’m too clever for that. So, I go and buy myself a Dell Studio 15. It arrives, and it’s stupidly thick and clunky. And with tax and shipping it costs as much as the Apple.
So, the stupid thing arrives. I play some sounds from it. It sounds like crap. I think, “wow, that sounds like crap”. So, I rand a 200 Hz sine wave through it, and the internal speakers sound like crap, and when I plug it into external speakers, they sound like crap too.
So, I call customer support. They’re experiencing ‘heavy call volume’. It tooks about 25 minutes to get to a human. That human sent me back into the wait queue to talk to another human. That one sent me to another. That one sent me to another. And that one sent me to another, who was the ‘Returns Desk’ lady. It was about an hour to get to the Returns desk, who was the FIFTH person I talked to.
The Returns lady only had one question for me: “Have you contacted technical support?” I said no, and she said that I’d have to do that before I could return the computer.
Crap.
So, the Returns lady sends me over to Technical Support guy. After 20-30 minutes in another queue, technical support guy answers. Technical support guy is a reasonably competent guy in India, who does a remote desktop session with me. For 2 hours! Install drivers. Reboot. Install Drivers. Reboot. Install Driv…. You get the idea. I tell him, “I’m an engineer who works on this stuff all the time, and it sounds like a hardware problem to me, there’s no way it’s a software problem.”
After 2 hours, and the audio still sounds like crapola, he finally relented and sent me back to the Returns desk. After waiting about 20 minutes on hold, I get a lady that answers, “Dell switchboard, how can I help you?” Christ. I tell her that I want to make a return. She asks if I’ve spoken with technical support. I told her that I’ve already spoken to the customer support guy.
She looks into my account. And after another 5 minutes, says, “The returns desk is closed. Please call back between 8am and 8pm Central Standard Time.”
Oh for crap’s sake!
So, next day comes, and I call again. I\ took me 40 minutes to get to a human, and maybe another 20 to complete the transaction. For a total investment of probably 5 hours on the phone! AAARRRRGGGGHHHH.
I ordered and received my macbook already — free shipping and no tax.
The moral of the story: Always listen to Dean.
P.S. before sticking the return UPS label on the package, I installed Adobe Audition and used that to make some measurements…. and guess what? It worked just great. No distortion at all. I guess it was a software problem after all. Oopsie. Well I’m glad I finally got rid of the dumb Dell.