It's not news that it's become harder to get support information from Dell. But one reader's recent experience indicates the communications problems may be spreading to the sales side as well.
The reader was in the market for new Veritas Backup Exec software and was exploring his supplier options. "Dell offers a product called the Dell PowerSuite Veritas Backup Exec Server," the reader wrote. "It appeared to include several of the Backup Exec options we needed at an attractive price. Unfortunately, my quest to find out exactly what it includes proved to be an exercise in futility. I spoke with four different representatives at Dell, three of them sales reps and the other from tech support."
While some of the reps he spoke with had thick accents, the real problem was that none of them seemed to have any information. "What did I learn from these four people?" the reader wrote. "Absolutely nothing. I spent 90 minutes on the phone on hold and got nowhere. The sales reps just read the website to me over and over again. I guess they assumed that I couldn't read it myself. I explained to them exactly what I needed to know in terms a child could understand and they still could not grasp what I was saying. I got so aggravated that I finally hung up. Miraculously I got a call back five minutes later and spoke to another rep, but he turned out to be no more helpful than the others. After fifteen wasted minutes he told me he would research it and call me back."
The reader says the information he needed about Dell's Veritas offering were basic things like what version of BackUp Exec it was, what options it included, and how many servers they could use with it. I ended up calling the Large Business Division at Dell," he writes. "After three calls to them and several e-mails, they finally provided enough information for us to realize it was not what we wanted. We ended up buying the software from CDW."
A long-time Dell customer, the reader says that this type of experience has become all too common. "I used to buy everything from Dell, but their customer experience has deteriorated so badly that I have started to purchase more and more items elsewhere," he wrote. "I don't buy their desktops anymore and am probably going to stop buying their laptops and servers as well. Who has the time to be bothered with the kind of aggravation I went through?"
Post your comments about this story here and read what your fellow readers have to say. You can also write me directly at Foster@gripe2ed.com.
12:44:47 AM 
|
