Hi

I am gonna say this i think indians have to deal with shit in their daily life and i think any person would feel for them but they have come to a stage where now they expect this to happen to them and now cheap companies like dell have outsourced their call centres to save money but we are stuck with people who either cant speak english or if they ccan they dont understand what they are saying lol i mean if you get my point its like training a dog to be a cat. you tell them some problem and they will hear some other problem its frustrating but do they care and then yeah they do become offensive and that totally happened to me to like dell is doing a favor by fixing my laptop and they dont save anything tell me how does this low level call centre guy now what they are making or not? they are trained to either bullshit or either these indians live like this in their everyday life and expect us to follow suit i mean come on you pay money you expect service same with my orange cellular provider indian call centre and same problem with the phone they just dont understand damn these big companies for saving a buck and putting us through this shit.

I am experiencing a problem like this right now.

However, the first technician that had the parts and was only 20mins away, you should have got in your car and drove to him if you were so desperate. That’s what I would have done!

Anyways, I am on day 5 waiting for a Power Supply for a Dell OptiPlex 390. The power supply is the 3rd dispatch, as dispatch 1 and 2 were for a POWER CORD. Yes, instead of sending me a power supply they sent me a POWER CORD. AND, they sent a tech with those power cords. HAHA.

We paid A LOT extra for the ProSupport Next Business Day Warranty, so I haven’t been talking to people in India and they still can’t resolve my issue.

Every time I contact Dell about the status of my power supply, they say “tomorrow”.

This is an excellent example of what large businesses (that suck) do to avoid dealing with the consequences of how much they Suck. :)
Your last paragraph summed it quite well..
Bouncing them from left to right until they shut up, etc..

I remember HP sent me a box a couple days, priority, I sent it back, it was done in another few days, and I was happy. And I felt satisfied. Nothing to bitch about, nothing to complain about, and will go back again.
And this is what brings in the money, not bad policies and covering it…

Yea you think dell is bad try priceline, after dealing with their customer service you will feel like dell is a walk in the park!

@ Jenn:

Btw, does anyone still gets hard copies of their pictures? I haven’t seen actual printed photos in ages now. Everyone just facebooks them and then looks at me like I’m from space and I ask them to send me the original copies of the ones I like so I can upload them to a non-retarded service like flickr. :P

@ Gothmog:

LOL at “German Mode”. To be honest,it takes a lot of my willpower to actually get angry at these people. Seriously, I’m a very easy going, non confrontational person. To piss me off you really have to push my buttons and so far, only my closest family and friends have figured out how to do that.

I don’t know – I always have this irrational notion that all problems can be solved by being nice, and politely talking like civilized people. That if I politely and eloquently explain to the person on the other line how I’m not happy with their service they will fix things. Everyone always tells me that I’m totally doing it wrong and I need to be angry and yell at people moar.

So I’ve been working on my angry phone voice these days. Sadly I’m a pretty lousy actor. Oh, and I sometimes momentarily lapse back into the polite mode again and I’m like “fuck, I was supposed to be angry… They are on to me now!”

@ Tino:

I came to the conclusion that the outsourced tech support people don’t actually care if a customer goes to #3 stage. It does not affect them in any way, because their performance is measured by numbers of resolved and unresolved calls and their ability to get the customer off the phone in the least amount of time.

The people who care about stuff like that are much, much higher on the corporate chain, and they are usually inaccessible to customers.

@ Macedoneus:

That is amazing. I wish I had these people skills. My parents don’t even speak English so I am always the person who has to make all the fucking calls – despite being the most introverted and non confrontational person in the family. My brother on the other hand is the charming bastard type who can talk his way out of any situation, and he pretty much social engineered his way through college – but no one in the family actually trusts him to make any important calls anywhere.

@ Matt`:

That’s exactly what I said. That’s not how warranty works.

“this is how much you pay for the warranty, and this is the cost of the parts we replacing – so we are already losing money by helping you”

Well that’s pure bullshit. If that were the way the economics of it worked, you might as well take the cost of the extended warranty and put in a safe place in case anything ever happens. There would be literally no point in buying a warranty if all it was intended for was replacement parts up to the cost of what you paid them.

The idea is the same as insurance – statistically, if 5% of people are going to experience a problem and those problems cost an average of X, then each customer only needs to pay in 5% of X for the company to recoup their costs.

I personally have never had to deal with this sort of thing, I always let my mother handle them. I don’t know how she does it, but whenever she talks to tech support, they listen and handle her case as fast as possible, and if she gets jerked around like you have been, she always manages to get the higher-ups scrambling to placate her.

Case in point: I had bought a DELL desktop a little more than a year ago, but about a week after the warranty expired, it crapped out. Nothing I did worked, so I gave it to my mom saying “If you can get it working, it’s all yours”. 1 week later, DELL had not only sent out a tech twice to replace everything but the case, but the secretary of the CEO sent her an email apologizing for the computer failure.

One of these days I’ll just sit behind her and take notes while she’s working her magic to learn her secrets.

Nice to read this, since I am also in the middle of a horribly bad support experience right now. Several computers were delivered defective, and we have not yet received a complete fix after 2 months.

I typically escalate through three stages of unhappiness:
1) I am merely unhappy.
2) I will avoid products/services from that company in the future. If asked by others, I will recommend against them.
3) I will actively evangelize through all channels I have about the horribleness of these products and services to anyone I can reach. My ultimate hope is that the company is driven into bankruptcy, so that neither I, nor anyone else, will ever have to deal with this bs again.

My humble advice for companies is to try to organize their support safeguards so no customers reach level 3.

Luke- I feel your pain, brother. I really do.
HP makes an internal WWAN EVDO modem (HP un2420) that has got to be the WORST supported device on the planet. I’ve spent over 20 hours in the past 3 weeks talking to HP, Verizon and Sprint trying to get the damn thing to work. HP has sent me 3 replacements, I’ve installed it in 4 different laptops- and I STILL haven’t gotten the damn thing to work. At one point I got HP *and* Verizon conferenced together, because they were playing the finger-pointing game.
My co-workers around me have noted that around the 2-hour mark I go into what they call ‘German-mode’ (I grew up in Germany for 11 years) and change from exhausted, frustrated tech to complete and utter IT-bastard.
My voice deepens (this is what they tell me- I’ve never noticed any of this apart from the red haze in my vision), I use phrases like ‘I’m *appalled* at this terrible level of customer service!’ and ‘Please get a PENCIL and WRITE the thrice-dammed IMEI number DOWN this time- I swear I’ve read it to you 4 times now!’
I can’t agree with you more, Luke- there’s been a disturbing change in support quality over the last couple of years and it is frustrating in the *extreme*.

Gah- I have to call Verizon and HP up again this afternoon. Wish me luck.

Dell’s Next Business Day is a lot like CVS’ One-Hour Photo!