The DOBlog

Category: Customer Service

  • Dell Hell – a slight return

    It was announced yesterday that Dell are cutting 100 jobs in Ireland. Hmmmm…

    Dell is a company in trouble that is desperately trying to reinvent itself. However, my experience is that Dell is a company that is also deluding itself and incurring potentially large amounts of avoidable costs through poor management of processes and poor information quality.

    Regular site visitors may remember my “Dell Hell” posts. I haven’t posted much on this recently, which may give the impression that this issue has been resolved.

    Has it f**k. 5 months after I took delivery of the laptop Dell still have not completed manufacturing it to the specification I ordered. I am dealing with a single named person in Dell at this stage. 4 weeks ago I spoke to her and she undertook to send an other graphics card to me. She then emailed confirmation that she had done this to my work email address (which I’d specifically asked not be used).

    4 weeks (and 2 emails from me) later I haven’t had an acknowledgement or confirmation that anything is happening and I still don’t have the laptop I ordered and am paying for. This is NOT rocket science but Dell can’t get it right.

    To date I estimate that on a €1500 laptop Dell have spent the best part of €1000 to not fix my problem and continue to piss me off. If we assume that the laptop cost Dell €1000 to assemble & sell in the first place (assumes a 10% markup on the ex-VAT price) then Dell have LOST €500 (50% of cost of sales) on me as a customer.

    50% of cost of sales. That’s a lot isn’t it. And all as a result of poor quality information and poor quality process management.

    For my part I’ve gotten a few articles out of this and a few blog posts…

    Articles:

    Silver linings I have… all they’re seeing in Dell right now are clouds.

    50% of cost of sales… f**k me – if I had a business doing that badly I’d fold my tent and bugger off as well.

    +++Update+++
    Via The Register I found this story about Dell’s new moves to reinvent itself. Reading down through it I found the following quote. Apparently Dell…

    “..expect to ship customers a complete product. We’re not going to finish off products at customer sites with our services business.”

    Whaddefook? Why then am I still waiting for a techie to come and finish building my consumer Inspiron laptop (at my premises)? I would have expected that it would have been built to spec in the factory…

  • For the avoidance of doubt…

    The first bit of doubt

    Various Dell representatives have explained to me my problem as being one of how my graphics card uses hypermemory. However that doesn’t resolve the issue that I the option I selected when building my machine was for a card with 256MB dedicated video RAM – the fact that it could use hypermemory to extend that further was irrelevant.

    Screenshot of my graphics card properties.

    For the avoidance of doubt I’ve uploaded a screenshot of the properties of the graphics card from the ATI administration utility. Maybe I’m reading it wrong but it sure looks like a 128MB graphics card to me, hypermemory or no hypermemory.

    The other bit of doubt

    As some of you may know, I do the odd bit of teaching and guest lecturing at a university in Dublin City (rearrange the words to figure out which one). There’s another member of staff there who, lucky person that he is, shares a variant of my name. By variant I mean that the name is phonetically and aurally identical but there are a few small differences.

    • Dr. Darragh O’Brien uses his title (hard earned and well deserved) which is a title I don’t have (I’m just a pretender at this whole ‘knowing academic things’ it would seem).
    • Dr. Darragh spells his name with 2 ‘r’s. I don’t.
    • He uses an apostrophe in his surname (O‘Brien) where as I don’t)

    This is important as Dell just emailed him and phoned him trying to get in contact with me. The waves of surrealism are lapping harshly on the shores of my patience at this stage. Thankfully Dr. D (as I will refer to him to avoid confusion) forwarded me the email he got which I’ve responded to. He’s used to it – the Admin team in the particular faculty had him listed to teach my class for a while on the on-line course tools.

    I’m am heartily impressed that Dell went to the trouble of going to the university website and looking up contact details for me… I mean him… I mean me… …. drat, now even I’m confused. Particularly as they already had my personal email address in the email correspondence I’ve had and associated with my order and the support cases I’ve raised.

    All of which made me decide to dig out an old slide I use in presentations on Information Quality that shows why I got interested in the issue in the first place.
    Why i got into information quality

    For those of you who can’t use the powerpoint viewer here, I’ve converted the slide to a gif for your viewing pleasure.
    Why I got into IQ slide gif

    Dr. D — If you’re reading this thanks for the email forward and I hope you find my slide ‘amusing’.

  • What the Dell… an actual response… from a human!!

    What are the odds?

    In the week that scientists tell us they have discovered a planet that might support alien life, I got a response from a live person in Dell. And not in their off-shored outsourced Call Centre neither… this one was from ‘Dell Central’. Rick (for that is his name) reached out to me from Round Rock Texas as that is his job – he is part of an Internet Outreach team. I’m impressed – it took 3 days for Rick to respond to me but I’m still waiting for Samuel (the phone support supervisor I eventually got to speak to last week) to get back to me after a week.

    They never write, they never call… don’t they love me anymore? 🙁

    Also, there is the small matter that Dell have not responded to my “Unresolved Issue” report (via Dell Support on-line) which was raised on the 13th of April – that’s 13 elapsed days… If I hadn’t heard from Rick I’d have started to think they just didn’t care, that they had my money and that was all that mattered. But Rick has, thus far, restored my faith somewhat. At least he was proactive in reaching out to me.

    Dell Wars Part IV – A New Hope (?)

    I’ve taken Rick up on his invitation to contact him about my issues. Hopefully he’ll have read the various blog posts here under Dell Hell and will be up to speed on the issues I’m having. I’ll keep my readers posted on how this Soap Opera plays out… of course, a soap opera is usually a work of fiction – this is a painful case of fact.

  • Another example of Dell not connecting the dots

    The Register has this story about a fault in Dell Laptops.

    What is interesting about the problem is that it seems to expose some ‘failures’ in the passing of information internally within Dell, not least about their Direct2Dell website.

    Some interesting comments are made about UK trading standards. I’m hoping to have a post up soon analysing the legal aspects of my (on-going and still unresolved) issues with Dell.

  • Ding Dong Dell

    Deary me. Life with Dell just gets better and better. Not 2 hours after I finish writing up my experiences for the IAIDQ Q2 Newsletter then I find myself on the phone to a nice guy from Dell who is asking me about my DVD drive issues (phone call at 15:25 today approx).

    I had a feeling of dé ja vú, partly because I spoke to the same guy (or a sound-alike colleague) last Tuesday about that issue and agreed that it was resolved to my satisfaction. On Tuesday I tried to get a word in about my ongoing graphics card issue but was politely told to ‘send a email’.

    Today however I was transferred to the supervisor, whose name I took to be Samuel. Nice guy. very focussed on finding out my issues. He went into some detail explaining how ATI graphics cards take additional memory from the main system RAM as required so while it might be 128MB it can take extra from the system… then he realised I’d ordered 256MB dedicated video RAM and he became even more helpful and looked into it further.

    45 seconds later he came back to me to confirm that Customer Service had sent me a 128MB graphics card in error and that he would follow up and take care of it and would call me back on Monday.

    Now… what could be the root cause for someone in a call centre selecting the wrong thing from a list? Could it be that the systems and processes that exist for Dell service are not supportive of the staff’s best efforts to do their job right? If the system relies on a pick list or an alphabetic search then it is possible that this is a source of error in the process.

    All I know is that I have yet to talk to a Customer Service rep in Dell who sounds like they have a lot of pride in their work anymore. Samuel was the exception in recent times. Lucy (the tech support person I dealt with on day 1 about my DVD issues) was bright and perky but as a former call centre jockey myself I could sense an underlying tone of “we’ve been dropped in it again, why do I bother”.

    My experience is that Dell Customer service staff are all nice people who are trying to do the best job they can under pressure. I’ve been there myself as a call centre agent and supervisor – I know how it feels when the sytems don’t work, the data is wrong and the customer is furious at you – the representative of the behemoth. It is not a nice place to be in and it makes it hard to take pride in your work and be proud of who you work for. As a result, when you do spot the easy idea to help make things better you think “why should I bother? management don’t”

    My experience of errors and cockups from Dell suggests that the systems and processes that these people have to support them are letting them down. Poor quality processes, poor quality information and an increasing worry about the bottom line and profitability all weighs heavily on morale and pride. More importantly it drains money out of the organisation.

    I look forward to Monday. I may be naive but I am putting my trust in Samuel to follow through on his promise to sort this problem out. He sounded a bit shocked when he came back after looking at my customer service history. If they get it right this time then I might refrain from putting all of this into a conference presentation on the costs and impacts of poor Information Quality.

    Then again, maybe not. I could fill 3 hours at this stage.

    Current estimated cost of rework to deliver the laptop I ordered (ignoring warranty replacement of a defective dvd drive) is approx 44% of the purchase price of the laptop. No wonder margins are slipping in Dell.

  • Dell Hell

    Right… just when I thought it was safe to go back in the water….

    Regular readers of the DoBlog will know that I recently bought a world of pain and torment a laptop from Dell.

    The very first problem I had was with the graphics card – it was not what I had ordered. After a litany of screw-ups Dell eventually got me, a technician and a replacement graphics card in the same point in space.

    I thought that battle was over.

    Stone me but I was wrong. While doing some diagnostics this morning after replacing the defective DVD Drive I noticed that the base score in Windows Vista hadn’t changed since the new graphics card was installed. So I took a look at the bios and saw that the ‘new’ graphics card was a 128MB model x1400 ATI Radeon Mobility… exactly what the technician took away with him when he replaced the original erroneous part. I was… I’d like to say shocked but the feeling was more like the dismay a parent feels when their child brings home an F in fingerpainting.

    I have discussed the issue with my Samoan Attorney and he advises me that

    1. I should have listened to him and bought a Mac. (But he’s a lawyer so not to be trusted) 😉
    2. I should gather my emails, my original order specification and all my blog posts and put them in a registered letter to the head of Dell in Ireland. (there goes my weekend)
    3. I should tag all of my posts here with “Dell Hell” as there are pixie minions in Dell watching for these things and ready to leap in to action to put things right

    That’s a bit like shutting the door when the horse has bolted (hang on, where have I used that phrase recently?)

    Surely the appropriate response is not to firefight (which is what this team appear to be about) but to prevent the occurence of the problems in the first place? At this point, any profit margin Dell had (including the cost of the finance package I used to fund the purchase of a laptop of a given specification) has evaporated. Putting additional cost into the supply chain by employing people to inspect the defects out does not make sustainable sense.

    My recommendations for Dell, based on my experience:

    1. Imrpove your processes. They are deficient. If a product can ship that does not meet the ordered specficiation then there is a weakness in your processes
    2. Break down barriers between areas so that your actual root causes can be addressed
    3. Improve the quality of your information. Everything I have experienced has been due to poor quality information within the supply chain, from the incorrect card being shipped, to a desktop card being shipped to replace that, to the incorrect replacement card being shipped. There were attributes of all of those things (number of MB of RAM, type of card vs type of machine it would go into etc.) that could have prevented me having any problem but at the very least would have triggered a different flow of events and a different outcome for me the customer.
    4. Create a constancy of purpose about improving quality and building quality in from the point of order capture (where the defects might first arise) through to the manufacturing process and onwards to the customer service processes (which can’t seem to operate with the fact that a person may be located at more than one address, particularly if they have a laptop)

    The courier who delivered my replacement DVD drive today told me that he dreads doing deliveries for Dell as there is always a very high chance there will be some information wrong on the delivery notes. For example he had some packages for delivery in a rural part of my area (non-unique addresses) so he required a telephone number. The phone numbers had been mis-transcribed and as a result were not numbers in the area he was delivering to. Some of them were office numbers of the people in question – who had requested delivery to an alternate address.

    For any Dell person who might happen upon this post, here is a link to the rest of my posts on this.

    Another question raises its head now that I have a broken and unusable DVD drive that needs to be disposed of, that of the WEEE regulations. Dell have provided me with no means of returning the faulty component (nor did they do so for the graphics card that was taken out originally). As these components can contain hazardous material they fall under the remit of the WEEE regulations and, according to my Samoan Attorney, Dell should provide me with a means of returning said components to them for disposal (or for reuse in other machines in the case of the non-faulty but just incorrect graphics card).

    Despite repeated requests to Dell support by email no-one has given me any information. Indeed, the email from Dell re: the DVD-Rom specifically told me that “you do not have to return the old drive to Dell”. Sounds like a potential breach of EU law there…

  • Oh Dell (the return)

    The DVD drive on my Dell laptop failed (again) over the weekend so I requested a replacement as per their warranty.

    The technician requested my address and an alternate delivery address and also asked for details of my availablility over the 48hr period from Tuesday.

    I provided my home address (Wexford) and the address of the office building I work in in Dublin. I also SPECIFICALLY stated that I would not be available to accept deliveries at the Wexford address until Friday and that if the drive was being delivered on Thursday it should be delivered to my office.

    Guess where it went to.

    Courier will deliver it again tomorrow (Friday). From my conversation with him on the phone it seems that this is a regular occurence in Dell.

    They had a perfectly sound process to gather information to meet the expectation of their customer. However somewhere along the line they managed to screw it up and ignore important pieces of information.

    Why waste my time asking for an alternate delivery address and details of my availability when they will be ignored?

    Dell…. oh dear.

  • Oh D(H)ell… a slight reprise

    got this email from Dell yesterday

    Dear Valued Customer,

    Thank you for contacting Dell Customer Care on 27/03/2007 with a question or need for Dell. We appreciate the opportunity to assist you and are interested in your feedback concerning our performance.

    Dell has asked TNS Prognostics, a customer satisfaction research company in the IT industry, to help us conduct a survey regarding your experience. To help ensure we are providing expert assistance, please provide your feedback in this brief survey. This survey should take approximately 5 – 7 minutes to complete.

    To complete the survey, please click on the Web address below. If that does not work, copy and paste the entire Web address into the address field of your browser.

    https://dell.prognostics.com/s.asp?ID=F3FA3D808C094F2EB997744E7861C2C5

    If you are an AOL user, please click on the following link:

    {Link to AOL version of survey removed by me}

    NOTE: Some e-mail programs may split the above URL onto two lines. If you are prompted for a PIN, please cut and paste the following into provided space:
    {pin for survey removed by me}

    We look forward to your feedback.

    Yours sincerely,

    Dell Support Team

    All fine and dandy except that I didn’t contact them on the 27th of March. On the 27th of March I had the visit from their techie who installed my graphics card and then getting an update call from tech support about my DVD drive issues (which I’d fixed myself).

    Needless to say I’ll be scoring them quite low on the quality of their products. I pity Lucy (my erstwhile Tech support maven) and her colleagues who seem to be left as much at sixes and sevens as customers.

    All I’ve previously posted still stands. And I will be filling out the survey… oh yes… I will.

  • Some good quality experiences

    I recently bought a case for my PDA from the lovely people at Proporta. Unfortunately, a few days after getting the case the belt clip disintegrated with the hinge part simply snapping off. I was dismayed.

    By co-incidence that day I received an email from one of Proporta’s customer service people following up on my order. I responded to the email and explained the situation. By return of email I was assured that some replacement belt clips were on the way and I am expecting them soon.

    Proporta have asked me if they can quote my feedback to them in their testimonials… and I say definitely they can as their process seems to be very customer focussed with a quick turn around on issues. I can’t help contrasting that with my experiences with Dell.

    The cost to Proporta of replacing the belt-clip is probably a lot less than the likely referrals or follow on sales that they will get as a result of the positive feedback (and link from this blog). I am likely to buy from them again myself.

    Good quality, be it in products or service, promotes growth and profitability. Well done Proporta.

  • Oh D(h)ell… an update

    Dell Technician came to my office today. This was after a techie had called to my home last Thursday. When I was in London presenting at an Information Quality conference (does 2 speaking slots count as a keynote?).

    The fact that I was going to be away had been clearly communicated to Dell’s support people on Tuesday of last week. But a technician called to my (empty) home all the same. Even if my cat had been inclined to let him in (for only the cat was in residence), the laptop was with me because my presentations were on it.

    So a technician called to me today. He rang me and (shock) double checked where he was to go (my home or my office). Luckily I had beene expecting him and had the graphics card with me.

    So at this count, the cost to Dell of finishing (please note FINISHING, not FIXING) my laptop is at least the cost of 2 technician call outs and the cost of a graphics card. I gave Seamus (for that was his name) the 128MB card to take away as in my office, like many others, there is a resident technology guru/’liberator’ who would gladly have taken it home to put in an old machine of his. That has saved Dell a few euros.

    I will be packaging up the Desktop card and posting it to Dell at the weekend – increasing the cost to me of this laptop by the cost of that postage. However it is the honest and ethical thing to do, particularly as they have not given me any indication as to what the process is for returning things they sent me in error.

    What else would I do with a desktop graphics card in a house where my wife and I both have laptops?

    What else indeed?

    And I’ve also sorted out my DVD drive issues (on my own). As I had diagnosed back in the beginning, the culprit was the Roxio driver that Windows Vista was surpressing due to incompatibility. I uninstalled all of Roxio (for now) and everything worked fine again. I found on the Roxio site’s discussion forum that the real culprit is the Roxio “drag to CD” utility.