There is a fundamental communication breakdown at work here. Dell tech support drones do not talk to each other, and to not talk to their contractors. Furthermore, they are to lazy to write case notes.

When you’re talking a large call centre with people dedicated to the phone, you’re talking huge call volumes and people on the phone fairly constantly. It’s not like a small shop where people can chat about the day’s calls. The case notes thing is unforgivable though – even a few lines is very helpful to the next poor sap who gets the case. I used to work in customer support centre for a telco and I was considered unusual for leaving detailed, useful case notes. I actually got in trouble with my second, stupider team leader because I *fixed* people’s problems instead of fobbing them off and keeping the KPIs ticking over.

The thing to remember about large call centres is that the poor sap on the other end of the phone isn’t there because he’s passionate about the job and really wants to help you, it’s because he can’t get a job elsewhere and has to eat. The smarter ones move up and out and the chaff stays. It’s a crummy place to work, particularly if you deal with the general public.

At the telco I lost count of the number of customers who ran businesses from residential class lines and “lost thousands an hour” because the SLAs are looser on residential lines… and if you’re making that much an hour, you can afford a business class line. Sorry, it’s just a hobby horse of mine – people expect world-class performance at bargain basement prices. Ultimately, if you want good service, vote with your feet and pay for it, because it’s far from cheap.

Regarding Dell, they seem to have improved over recent years and their reliability now seems appropriate for their price point.

@Ryan: Oh wow. Nice to be able to order the parts yourself, but these exams sound like a major pain in the ass. We only have around 50 machines in total and so far it has been ok for the technician to come in and fix it.

@mikev80: Never tried their chat support. I may need to try it one day and see if it’s less annoying than the phone support.

I’ve become a great fan of their chat service…much easier to communicate and comprehend without saying, “excuse me, can you repeat that?”

You can really tell they don’t have any technical know-how’s when they ask me to swap out the memory chip and reboot, and I respond, “okay, I just did that” 10 seconds later. If only my hands were that quick and XP booted in under 10 seconds.

We have about 1900 desktops and laptops, all Dell. We are leasing most of these and we have gotten an extended warranty on these. We don’t have to go through *quite* as much crap with them because most of the tech dept are “dell certified” so we can request our own warranty parts.
There are a few things that i don’t like about this arrangement however. We have to pay to join the “Warranty Parts Direct ” program, we have to take these insane tests for different lines of computers, such as laptops, desktops, servers, printers etc. that we pay *per test* in addition to the fee to enroll. These tests have to be re-purchased if you fail (no one has failed one yet though) and they expire yearly, along with the enrollment. Currently we have a server with a bad fan, that we can’t get a purchase order approved, to buy the test to take the test, to request the warranty part. Also, for the same political reasons, we can’t have one of their on site techs come out and fix it.
Aside from those issues, we log into a website, enter the service tag, enter a brief description of the problem and after approval from Dell, the part gets shipped overnight in most cases.
This is a life saver, esp. considering that there are only two laptop/ desktop techs for the district.
I have my gripes with the system and have had almost the same problem that Luke has described but with getting the wrong mobo sent out, send back, having the same bad mobo come back to me, sending it back again, getting my part request denied because i have requested the same part for the same computer three times, then finding the only other model in the district using that service tag and finally getting a working mobo.
Also worth noting is that almost all the parts send by dell are refurbished.
I have only gotten one other bad part in two years using this however.

@Matt`: You are correct. I actually took the damn thing apart before I called Dell hoping I could “reattach” it on the spot. No ball. The damn thing is held in place by the flimsy little snap-in “claws” that hook into the motherboard. It is actually not supported by the mobo cradle, or the plastics. You hit it once or twice the wrong way and it get’s loose. Once it gets loose you can sever connection quite easily.

“The socket seems loose and is not charging properly unless the power cord is held in a specific position.”

I’m pretty sure I’ve had this exact same problem before… twice in fact. From what the tech they sent out said, it’s fairly easy to break the power connector over time if the adapter plugged into it gets jiggled too much or puts pressure on the board. Example being if you pick it up with the cord plugged in and lift the front side first so that that the plug in the back of the laptop turns into a little lever pushing against the desk and the mobo.

I’ve always had decent support from Dell… sometimes takes a few emails back and forward to get stuff fixed, if I was pressed for time that would probably piss me off, but they’ve always ended up replacing the faulty parts.

@Shawn: Yeah, we use an early incarnation of SITS which is very tightly coupled to a much bigger house built intranet system. Or rather, SITS is my attempt to use what I learned building that ticketing system, and re-write it from scratch as an open source project.

Which doesn’t help you much because at the moment it is vaporware.

I would recommend Trac as a good alternative. Very configurable, and very simple to use if you get over the fact that the administration options must be done from CLI. I’d highly recommend it, with a small caveat – it’s a pain in the ass to set up in a windows environment. If you do have a liux box running somewhere it will take you 3 minutes to set up.

@Mart: Actually I still have several Inspiron 4000’s that are chugging along just fine. They are probably 6-7 years old at this point. Despite the popular belief, some Dell systems can virtually run forever despite their shit hardware. Others drop like flies – it all depends.

@jambarama: Heh, I did that before too. Whenever they insist they need to replace hard drive, I’d just stick one of the old and flaky drives that I determined to cause issues and let them replace that.

Nowadays, I don’t think we would be allowed to let Dell walk out of here with our hard drive unless we blanked it out using software compliant with the DoD specs for secure electronic data disposal.

@freelancer: Wow, that’s pretty bad. At least the guy that came here did have the parts for the correct model. Just not all of them. But yeah, their coordination is crap.

@Andrei: LOL! Too funny! Though I have to admit I did something very similar once. I was fixing a laptop for a friend/family member. It involved replacing a mobo that I just got off ebay. I mixed up the screws, and ended up using the wrong one in the wrong place. I used a really long one, when I was supposed to use a short one and it went straight through the motherboard. I essentially drilled a hole through it with the screw.

Fortunately, when I tested the machine everything worked fine. Apparently I didn’t drill through anything important. :P

@Morghan Phoenix: LOL! Classic!

You see, I figured it long time ago that these people have no technical knowledge. So I just let them lead me through the motions, and when they ask me for something really silly I just tell them I did it and that it didn’t work.

But this issue was not technical in nature. I figured they should not have major issues picking up the phone and calling their contractor and straightening the whole thing out – or barring that, giving us the correct number to the said contractor. But I was wrong. :P

We had a few broken Dell laptops at my old high school once, and a technician came to fix them. Turns out he had brought the wrong motherboard, the wrong size screen and the wrong power adapter, and therefor couldn’t fix anything. I don’t know whose fault it was, but needless to say I wasn’t impressed.

Wow, that’s bad. I’ve not had an experience with dell support that bad before. Typically I’d slap in a blank hard drive, they’d replace the whole thing, and I’d put the real drive back in. You should send this to someone at Dell. Seems like they should want to work on their system.

BTW the support tickets looked fine in my rss reader (google reader).