Friday, October 3, 2008

Why I Hate Dell Outlet

I seem always to be blogging about poor customer service, but there's so much of it about to go round!

Ordered a laptop last Friday from the Dell Outlet. So this is a machine that is built, it exists and just needs payment to be taken, the machine stuck in a box and shipped. This is not rocket science, especially for a big player like Dell.

Got a confirmation email, promising further order status updates.

Five days pass, no news.

Call Dell. Call centre. India. Now let me take a moment to say that I have previously argued against automatically tarring all Indian call centres with the same brush, but I'll be damned if this wasn't the worst customer service experience I've had in years. They told me I had no order and that I needed to re-order.

So I called the Outlet sales people who told me that I did have an order, but Dell's computers didn't talk to each other, so customer service in India couldn't see outlet orders. I'm pretty sure it isn't beyond the gift of a company that makes, y'know, computers, to have a joined up IT system. But apparently it is. Hey ho.

Anyway, Outlet assure me order is fine and that it'll be processed yesterday (Thursday) and I'll have an email to confirm this by 6pm.

6pm comes and goes.

So I call them again today. Same guy. Investigates, assures me that the order will be processed by 4pm today.

4pm comes and goes.

Even if it comes tomorrow (it won't, they haven't even debited my card yet), I won't buy another Dell machine as long as I live, because I'll always remember the poor customer service. What I don't understand is why THEY don't realise that.

2 comments:

Deborah said...

Get. A. Mac.

:)

Mike said...

Normally I just build my own PCs, so it's a total non-issue, but you can't build your own laptops. I figured Dell might know what they were doing. Silly me.