So I’ve got two sick Dell laptops. There is a design flaw with the motherboard and the USB-C port breaks and is non-functional. The only way to repair the port is a motherboard replacement.
Since the laptops are under warranty, I fire up my browser and start a chat session with the “technician”. I explain the issue and what I have done to confirm my diagnosis - “yes I have unplugged it and plugged it back in”,
After another 10 minutes of back and forth, the agent confirms that I have an active Next Business Day On Site warranty. For my convenience, I can send it in to the depot for a 10-12 business day repair or they can provide an express 7-9 business day repair! I ask about the “Next business day” part of it. “Oh, I guess we can send a technician”.
Apparently in Dell Speak, next business day means that they have 1-2 business days to send the parts to the tech and THEN they will come in the day after for the repair.
This really should go in The Pit, but I don’t have the 3 business days it would take for the post to make it there…
It always seems as companies get larger, the service suffers. Deal with a small business and you may very well be dealing with the person that makes all the decisions. Deal with some company like UPS and they can’t even look up your new account rep’s information without having to research it.
To answer the question in your title, “Customer support managers who plan on reducing support costs as much as possible.”
If they can get you to accept a lower-cost warranty repair option than what you paid for, they win. So certainly, they won’t mention that “goldplate” service and hope that you forgot about it too.
Their training is just fine for what they really intend.
It makes perfect sense to me. Since you can’t open for business without a working computer, your “Next Business Day” is the day they get your computer working again, some time in mid-October.
I know this intellectually, but the NBD service is a paid upgrade when you buy the computer. If the default is to not honour this, they indicate their disdain for the customer.
Similarly I found out the hard way doing business with a few companies that NEXT DAY SHIPPING doesn’t mean you will get it tomorrow. It means they will ship it via NEXT DAY when they get around to actually shipping the thing.
Customer service reps are there to serve as a barrier between you and the people that have the power to help you. The company doesn’t make any money paying their labor to fix something that you have already paid for, so it is the job of the customer rep(or the recording of said customer rep) to convince you that trying to get help just isn’t worth the trouble. Numerous phone transfers, long recordings of options that do not pertain to your particular problem, being put on hold for periods of time that most people do not have time to waste…only to be dropped suddenly-These are all designed to make you give up.
It is my firm opinion that if you, as a customer representative, know for a fact that your real purpose is to stymie meaningful contact between the customer and the company giving you a paycheck, then you don’t have the right to complain if customer upsetness ensues.
If enough people did this when customer reps treated them like shit, and if such a movement actually effected sales in a significant way, customer reps would be told to treat people better.
But enough customers won’t, so the companies won’t.
I’ve been using Dell computers at work since 2000. I will never, ever, ever own a Dell computer. I mean, how does anyone even build a shitty mouse in this day and age?
I have a love-hate relationship with them. I bought a new iMac a year and a half ago. The wireless mouse and keyboard that came with it immediately went into a drawer (mainly because Apple’s mouses suck and the keyboard has no numeric keypad, also because of latency issues), and I use an older wired keyboard and an inexpensive macally mouse with it.
As a customer service guy, I resisted when The Company hopped on the bandwagon: if we all do more with less, everyone’s service will suffer equally and there will be no reason for customers to flock to one place or the other–service across the industry will be uniformly terrible. I couldn’t do it. I spent my last three years there playing Bob Parr because I’d rather have been unemployed than use people’s ignorance against them. Folks would still get agro from time to time, but they didn’t strike me as ‘ordinarily reasonable people under duress’, they were just too easy with abusing the voice on the phone. I would scold them. As a means of getting them to chill the fuck out and act like an adult, it worked oddly well. I wish I could have my old job back, but nothing like that exists anymore. Best I can do is punish the company I used to work for. And I do.
OP, when you said " the agent confirms that I have an active Next Business Day On Site warranty", by ‘confirm’, did you mean that you asked about it and they confirmed or that they brought it up unsolicited. If you asked about it and they agreed that you did, in fact, have it, I’d WAG that after answering your question, they went back to their script. A script which glosses past that and asks that you send it in. If they brought it up on their own, I’d still WAG, that their script is set up to bring up that option first and only use the next day on site service if the customer asks for it.
But, I could be wrong, that’s just how I read it.
The last Apple product I owned was an Apple IIe, so I don’t have a whole lot of experience with them. However, my daughter has an iPhone. A while back it bricked itself (she wouldn’t be able to do that if she tried, hacking/jailbreaking/sideloading is far beyond anything she’s even heard of). I called Apple, they told me to take it in. I took it in and I had to choose between waiting 3+ hours or setting up an appointment, the next one being over 2 weeks away, or, I suppose, taking my chances at another Apple store, but it was about 30-45 minutes away).
When I got back home I told someone that after that, I’d never even consider buying an Apple product (and, honestly, I don’t know why people put up with that). The person I was talking to said something along the lines of ‘what other choice do you have? What would you do if your [android] phone broke (under warranty)".
I mentioned that I would take it to a Verizon store and expect to walk out with a replacement or, at the very least, talk to someone within 5 minutes. Also, the Verizon store was so slammed that I didn’t feel like waiting*, there’s likely another one near by’
I ended up calling Apple again and they confirmed that it would need to be sent in and they’d send me a new one, but the turnaround was expected to be about 2 weeks. That, to me, is unacceptable. She’s young, she’ll survive, but a lot of people, myself included, use them for work. I can’t go 2 weeks without a phone.
I think part of the ‘problem’ is that Apple users are so brand loyal that they don’t mind having to deal with this from time to time so Apple doesn’t need to have stores (standalone and in malls) every 5-10 miles.
*The only time I’ve seen a VZW store so busy there was a line out the door was when they pushed a software update that locked up the phones until you could take it in to be fixed. “Luckily” the fix took about 20 minutes, so a lot of people were just dropping them off with the intention of stopping back a later, so the wait wasn’t that long.
This reminds me of something. Years ago, many many years ago, Tivo raised their montly rates. The people over on the Tivo message board went berserk, chastising tivo for charging more for the same thing. It was brutal. There’s Tivo employees that post there (it’s not an official tivo bbs) and one of them finally stepped in and mentioned that for the last X years, everyone has complained about the customer service, (and a few other things) we got better customer service (and upgraded the other things), but it costs a lot more etc etc etc. FWIW, at the time their customer service was horrendous and when they started working with a new company it was much, much better…but that costs money.
Also, I don’t know how you ‘punished them’, but a coworker of mine (we’re not CS, just have a small store) has found a very good way of dealing with those irate customers. While they’re going on and on and on, every few seconds he’ll say ‘can I talk’ or ‘are you done now’. That not so subtle way of saying ‘you called with a problem, there’s literally nothing I can do if you don’t put a sock in it’. It works quite well. Me, on the other hand, I’ll just let them go on and on until they tire themself out. That, or if they swear at me I’ll cut them off and say ‘sir/ma’am if you swear at me again I’m going to hang up on you’, and I’ll keep the promise.
In both cases, I don’t think people realize who agitated they are…over something that costs like a 50¢ and that kinda shuts them up for a half a second so we can start talking.
I was a tech guy at an all Mac school district for 10 years. During that time, I was involved in getting warranty work done for many iBooks (the PowerPC laptops) and later MacBooks - at least 40 or 50 over a ten year period. With laptops the drill was (and the experience was the same for people’s personal laptops as well as school owned ones):
Day 1: Call Apple. They’d send a box with a prepaid return label overnight. If we called before 2 or 3 p.m. we’d have it the next day.
Day 2 (or 3): Box would arrive in the morning. Put laptop in box, tape shut (packing tape was included in the box) and put return label on box.
Day 3 (or 4): Box would arrive at repair center. Repair would be done and laptop sent back, again with overnight shipping.
If the repair was called in on Monday or Tuesday we usually had the repaired unit back by Thursday or Friday. If it was something like a defective hard drive under warranty we’d usually get a replacement part the next morning that we could just swap out and send the defective part back to Apple. Only rarely did it take more than a week. Never had to set foot in an Apple store, and good thing - the nearest one was more than a 4 hour drive away.
I hope to never buy Dell again. But you got Same Day Service when you called, and the problem has been diagnosed, and now you are waiting for parts. Next Day On Site Service doesn’t mean it will be fixed any time soon. Did you think you had an uptime warranty?
But you still have to ride them. “We agree you have a problem.” can easily turn into "We’ve agreed you have a problem. What more did you want?
Not even the mice, but the fact that if you put the laptop to sleep, 90% of the time the WiFi will be inoperative on resume, forcing you to reboot.
And the combination of the usual corporate load of shovelware and the bloated crap like MATLAB and National Instruments libraries means I have to wait almost a half hour before my laptop becomes usable.
That might seem pretty fast, but still that means you’re without your computer for a week. That’s a long time.
At work for the last 15+ years that’s all I’ve ever used, Dell laptops. For the most part and for most people (me included), they work fine. I guess that’s what built them into the 10th largest tech company by revenue — mentioned in post #8 above. As the saying goes, perfection is the enemy of good enough.