Dell Service--My revised opinion
Jan 17 '00
Ksikes has hit the nail on the head. Dell recently bent me over the barrel when my hard drive broke:
My hard drive broke (mechanical failure) after only six months of use on a Friday. I called Dell on Saturday to have next business day onsite service, a plan which I had paid extra for. The technician finally came the following Wednesday to install the hard drive.
After he had physically put in the hard drive, he turned on the computer,let it boot to a DOS prompt, and then said he was finished. I asked him about the operating system and he said that I was responsible for reinstalling that. I am absolutely certain that when I bought this system and was led to believe by the Dell salesperson who peddled the additional service plan that this onsite next business day service would be service to bring my system back to its original, newly out of the box form. Thus, I certainly felt I had been had when the technician up and left in the middle of the installation.
Anyway, I am comfortable with basic software installation, so I followed the manual directions and reinstalled Windows 98. The system did not correctly recognize my modem, ethernet card, or monitor. Furthermore, once I got a Dell service guy on the phone again, he and I cooperatively determined that I did not have the sufficient driver software to complete the installation. He told me to go download it from the local library or a friend's computer. So not only did Dell not reinstall the software and operating system, but they did not provide me with the correct tools to do it myself, and once we had determined that, they wanted me to go out of my way to get the tools they should have supplied in the first place.
I called Dell customer support the next day and they were not at all
helpful. They said I had passed the 30 day period in which I could get a
formatted hard drive. That's nice, I said, but you misrepresented to me the service deal if that is the case. They told me to plead my case with
technical support if I wanted any help, because they were not willing to
provide me with any themselves.
I then called technical support. I explained to them the situation. I
believe them to have mistakenly thought that customer service had okayed
sending out a new, formatted hard drive, because they said that it normally is not done, but for some reason they would do it in my case. So, finally,on the following Friday, a technician came and installed a new, formatted hard drive, which is now working fine.
Finally, I received a cheery letter following up from
support.Dell.com. It was certainly polite, but it refers to Dell's
E-Courtesy, which is not exactly how I would describe a customer service in which you have to plead for a half-assed attempt at a service which you are entitled to and have paid for
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Epinions.com ID:
digamma
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