Had occasion to call Dell tech support a few times today and nearly ended up bald.
I replaced my workhorse Dell with a newer, shinier version Dell, specifically because of my prior experience with helpful and knowledgeable techs.
I couldn’t understand any of the, I assume, East Indian techs. Each of us had to repeat nearly every sentence. Number and letter strings had to be repeated back and forth numerous times. I’m familiar with at least a couple phonetic alphabets, but not the ones that they were trying to utilize.
As we tried to diagnose the problem, the techs kept putting me on hold for up to 20 minutes, while they would go read up on the problem or more likely answer other calls. I felt like I was paying for their education with my time.
I’m sure hoping that everyone will come to Dell’s defense and tell me that my experience today was unusual.
My ADSL provider recently moved all thier support to somewhere on the Indian subcontinent.
A few weeks back I rang them up to ask if they supported a particular ADSL modem that I wanted to buy. To my surprise after explaining my question the tech ( I use the term loosely ) he told me that I needed to reinstall my operating system.
“Uumm excuse me, my computer is working fine, I just want to know if you support this particular modem.”
“You need to reinstall your operating system sir.”
At this point I just gave up and bought the modem which works fine. All in all it was very annoying and made me suspect that that particular support engineer only had one standard reply for all the questions he was given. GGrrr.
A number of years ago I worked with someone who had bought a Dell because they had the reputation of supplying good tech support.
Then she called them with a problem. Several hours later, she’d spoken to numerous people, been put on hold multiple times for half an hour or more, and was then informed that her free tech support was up (I guess they only give, or gave, you a limited amount of time before they started charging), and her call was dropped, her problem still unsolved. Yep; tech support hung up on her. And this was before their tech support got outsourced to India.
I think she got the problem fixed, but not by calling Dell tech support. That one story is a major reason I’ll never buy Dell (the others are that I think their products are overpriced and that I think it’s more fun to do it myself).
It would be more descriptive to say Dell’s support has gone East. Ha ha. But really it has.
Morgyn, the Dell is dropping their prices, I bet you’d have a hard time building a machine at a better price. A coworker has built literally dozends of machines over the years and he quit recently cause it’s just easier to buy a Dell. now maybe he values his time more than the fun of assembling it, but I think the prices are pretty close these days. YMMV, of course.
I worked for Dell Tech Support for two years here in Nashville until 2000. In the second year I was there, EVERYONE in the building was afraid for their jobs. They had done a huge layoff the year before and received a lot of negative press. Then they got smart and started letting people go little by little. They stopped hiring Tech Support and instead used a hiring service called Spherion to staff the support desk. Then they opened a large support center in India, where (I heard) they could get away with paying staff about $2-3 an hour(?) Once that took effect, Dell-badged tech staff started being let go using their “no tolerance” policy as their reasoning. If they could find any blemish on your record (mine was a mistake made 6 months previous), then they’d let you go.
Since then I’ve heard nothing but complaints from former co-workers and current customers that tech support is seriously lacking from the actual award-winning service of previous years.
Well, I’ll tell you now, I will check on Dell’s support before purchasing another computer from them. If they are smart, they’ll be hiring you all back Max.
I don’t have time to be dealing with folks barely more computer literate than myself, and that language problem is intolerable!
What DaddyTimesTwo said. I used to assemble machines for myself and friends as a hobby, but current pricing decreases on major manufacturer (IBM, HP+Compaq, Dell) machines led by Dell, makes it silly to roll my own unless I want a gaming firebreather or have some other special need. The amount of good quality PC hardware I can get from Dell for 400 - 500 simply cannot be matched, quality for dollar, by assembling parts.
In this context something has to give and support is what gets cut. Support is expensive and ripe for the bean counters ax if something can replace it. The problem here is that this is (IMO) a major, major mis-step by Dell. There is no question that most of the East Indian tech support personnel are trying their best, but knowing the English language and easily conversant english are not the same thing.
I have been assisted by some eager east Indian techs (ladies mostly) who had trouble understanding me and I generally speak quite clearly. The problem is equal parts language and the fact that these people are reading from a script and (IMO) have little familarity with the machines other than what they have leaned in classes. I can generally figure out most of my own hardware issues, but when I have a particulary thorny problem it is important to be able to communicate the precise problem and this is very difficult in some cases and 95% of the time ends in “re-install” suggestion.
Now I could be pissed at this, but I have to step back and reflect on the fact that this super cheap, frustrating support is directly connected to the fact that Dell is selling these machines for 400-800 each on average, and I am familar enough with PC hardware pricing to know how close to the bone this is even for a major PC manufacturer like Dell.
I prefer IBM’s solution which was to base support in Ireland where people who are more easily conversant in American English, but can still be had for relatively inexpensive wages, but that was a few years ago and the Irish may not be so inexpensive nowadays.
I have talked to some people who have had terrible experiences with Dell support, including a woman yesterday who had been on the phone with them for several hours. At the end they out and out lied to her to get her off the phone.
That’s a damn shame, Max. Back when I first started buying Dell’s for my company, the service was wonderful. Now, though…it’s better just to fix it myself.
It was always a kick to call them back before they outsourced because everyone had these funky Austin accents…
I had a hellish nightmare of an experience with Dell tech support and customer service last April, and all but one of the rude, clueless people I spoke with did NOT have accents. They were all a huge PITA, though.
No more Dell computers for me. My Micron has been humming along just fine, thankyewverymuch.
I’m with slortar… our first home PC was a Dell, waaaay back in 1996. We had lots of questions, and the Dell support people had lots of answers – good ones even! And when the monitor went kerflooey (literally) about a month after we got the machine, we got a new monitor sent to us within 2 days, with no problems. Pretty flippin’ awesome.
It’s sad to hear that Dell has abandoned the one thing that would guarantee me coming back to them (great support) in favor of something that I can get elsewhere (low prices).
Ah well. Dude, guess I’m not getting a Dell after all.
When I call tech support, whether it’s for the computer hardware, the OS, some piece of software, DSL service, or whatever, I want to speak with someone who could write one of those scripts, not some ignoramus reading from one of them.
It’s so frustrating to deal with some bonehead who insists on asking you irrelevant questions in the order they appear on the sheet and then sidetracking you or trying to kill the call with “well, we don’t support that” when you haven’t even gotten to the point of describing the problem.
“What is the brand and model ID of the LAN PC Card you’re using?”
“It’s built-in. It has 10-base-T already so I’m not using a PC card”
“You have to have a LAN PC card to use this service, I’m sorry”
“No you don’t, I’m currently connected and I’m not using a PC card and connection isn’t my problem”
“Sir if you don’t follow instructions I’m not going to be able to help you”
It’s a shame that Dell has abandoned genuine tech support. Sorry to hear it.
Talk about a crapshoot… A few months ago, somene’s Dell laptop wasn’t booting. My first call evidently got routed to Bangalore, judging by the incomprehensible screechy woman I got connected to. (And I work with Indian programmers and sysadmins daily, so I’ve gotten accustomed to the dialect.)
Just couldn’t understand her, and she couldn’t understand me, so I gave up and tried again. This time, I got a guy who not only spoke fluent English, but actually was in (IIRC) Tennessee. Better yet, this guy was technically fluent and knew exactly what the problem was, had experience with it and knew not only what caused it but how to correct it.
If I’d connected with him on the first call, I’d have given Dell’s support an A+, but thanks to Ms Screech, who on her own was an F, it works out to a B-.
Reminds me of one call I had. The user asked me where we were located and I told her she was speaking to Nashville. “Oh really? How’d did you learn about computers?”
A+ guy could conceivably have been in Bangalore too, just smarter and more experienced than Ms Screech. Some call centers in India encourage staff to develop “American personas” down to regional accents, local trivia, and made-up personal histories.
Or so I’ve read. I want a job training them to do it! How cool would that be?
I think it’s mildly icky that folks in India are taught to lie about where they are to callers from the US, but if that’s what it takes, what the hell. I think it’s a lot more important that every single freakin’ support cente staffer has Actual Knowledge the which to provide Actual Support. Dell’s Indian support pool may suck, but not as hard as the City of Austin Water Utility, and they’re all local kids.
Oi, and the support staff at Time Warner Road-Runner… I had one of their support jockeys insist to me that computers do not have individual addresses or identifiers, that there is no such thing; indeed that there is no way to distinguish individual computers from each other from the Internet’s perspective…
BTW, what is this “funky Austin accent” of which you speak? Most of us seem to sound like Californians or Midwesterners. My supervisor has a hint of Texas, but then she grew up in Waco.
First Dell I had I got great tech support. The next one, I had an experience much like those already reported on. Everything was obviously being read off a script that ended with “reinstall your operating system.” Bah! Only problem is, as far as I’ve been able to tell, none of the others are any better.
I’ve had nothing but hard times dealing with Dell’s Indian tech support. And yes, they had me reinstall my Windows ME more than once. I’m not an idiot and I can solve some computer-related problems, so if I call tech support, I’m really at a loss. And usually they are too.
My Dell Dimension is going on three years old, and I love it, and for the most part it’s been great, but I pray every day that nothing else ever goes wrong so I don’t have to deal with them.
Much of the jobs in IT are going out of the US; what’s surprising is that India’s IT growth has slowed somewhat, as business has started to go to other countries even cheaper to operate in, and where the native language is also not English. -Which might be okay, were it not for the fact that these people are hired to attempt to communicate with English-speakers over the phone.
And I think it was Dell that took a major publicity hit a few months back when they moved their call center to India, thoughly infuriating many of their business customers. I couldn’t find anything on this particular story, but go to Slashdot and search for “outsourcing India” for lots of related and similar tales.
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