Sunday, March 16, 2008

Dells crappy company part #2

Just received an email from Dell telling it was too late to cancel my memory card order since it was already sent to the vendor. Gee, that was quick, huh? So I'll be sending everything back, camera included, for a refund when it gets here. And in the last half hour I talked a friend into cancelling his 3000 dollar plus order for a high end camera from Dell when he heard my story. We just found him a better deal without the hassle of having to deal with Dell.

Quite a price to pay for forgetting to put my memory card on the order, eh guys? Let's see, the memory card was 24 dollars. It would have cost you how much to cancel shipping charges on that tiny little thing as most sensible companies would have done to keep me happy over your mistake? Instead it has cost you my friend's camera order, my camera order, ink (I went online and ordered a new printer from someone else so I would never have to buy ink from Dell again. It was cheaper than the ink from Dell.)

And I'm not done yet. I have lots of friends who were going to spend their tax refunds on computers, cameras, etc. I've always recommended Dell in the past. Now I'm telling them to shop ANYWHERE but Dell.

My goal is to see how expensive I can make it for you to have forgotten to put the memory card on my order and then refusing to fix the problem. My guess it will reach 10,000 by the time I'm done...for this month alone because the stimulus rebate check shopping comes next and I'm going to make sure you don't get any of it from people I know.
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9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Unreal! How desperate are they that they have to try and screw you with shipping chages! I won't be buying from them anytime soon. Thanks for posting this.

Anonymous said...

I've worked in customer service/tech support before. Anyone worth their paycheck would have immediately cancelled the shipping charges on the memory card. I think you hit on something there about making money on shipping charges. It's the ebay way, dontcha know? And it also makes Dell look cheap and desperate. Not a good reputation to have out there when there's so much competition. They've made a fortune on ink so good to see you've gotten out from under that cash cow. It's really too bad because they have some good products but they outsource and lose customers over dumb shit like this all the time. Cheap desperate bastards probably don't even understand that shipping charges on a card that size won't even buy them a cup of coffee but it would have bought them a lot of good will with you the customer. Oh well, live and learn. One of these days we'll be reading about Dell the company that had so much potential and screwed themselves by being cheap bastards.

Dell Customer Advocate said...

My name is Larry and I am a Customer Advocate here at Dell headquarters in Texas. I just found your blog and wanted to let you know that I would like to look into the situation and see if there is anything I can do to help.

Normally, based on your description of what happened, I would expect the customer care rep to have helped you get the order placed with the correct items included or, at the least, get you in touch with a sales rep that could do so. We are not able to combine orders, but getting a new order created that, in effect, combined the two is not normally a problem. I am not sure why this did not happen in this case, but I will be passing on your feedback about what happened so we can try and keep it from happening again to someone else. Feedback from Dell customers is the best way for us to know where we need to focus our efforts in order to improve. I know from personal experience that Dell really does care about providing customers with the best service we can. We aren't perfect, but we are always trying to improve things.

In order for me to check the details I will need either the order numbers for the camera and memory card. If you would like me to see what I can do, feel free to email that information to me at customer_advocate@dell.com with "ATTN: Larry - memory card" in the subject (to ensure it gets to me). If there are any other details or feedback you want to include please do so. If you have any questions for me I will be happy to answer them.

Larry
Dell Customer Advocate

mishkabear said...

Why thank you Larry! I've just emailed you all the correspondence I had with your outsourced customer support. Have fun. And if you do manage to get my 4.99 shipping charge dropped on the memory card, then I will reconsider how I feel about your company and may even decide to keep the camera. It was a nice deal. But not if I had to order it again and lose the discount just to get my free shipping.

And remember, hiring local not only employs Americans who need the money, it keeps your company from getting a crappy reputation for not caring. As I said, I've never had an issue with your products, but I've always had a problem trying to correct anything that required calling or emailing "Bob." That has hurt your company more than anything.

mishkabear said...

Hey Larry, thanks for trying to pull a fast one on me. Your email goes straight to the moron who caused this whole problem to begin with. I've pasted the response to me sending you the emails below so others can see how you guys DON'T handle problems.

(begin quoted email:)
Dear xxxxxx,

Thank you for the reply.

I understand from your email that you want to the shipping charges to be taken off. I shall be glad to assist you with the issue.

The order have been placed separately and shipping will be charged for the orders placed separately. I would request you to receive the orders and then return they for credit, and then place the order once again all items in same order.

I do not have any option to refund the shipping charges to you. I surely hope that you do understand the issue.

Your case number for this interaction is xxxxx. Please keep this number for your records; it will help us keep track of this issue so we can better assist you if you have any further questions or concerns about your issue.

If you require further assistance, please feel free to visit our Online Customer Care Center at:
http://support.dell.com

Thank you again for contacting Dell Online Customer Care.

Respectfully,

Shivani Chauhan
Rep ID 131225
12:00 PM to 09:00 PM CST
Dell Online Customer Care
http://support.dell.com

kitchenmage said...

I have this kickass set of THX-certified surround speakers because Dell put the wrong sound card in the replacement for my buggy-for-two-years-while-we-fought PC. Seems that it against policy to upgrade sound cards when they have OEM versions available or some such nonsense, so 10 buck sound card upgrade or 275 buck speakers....hard call, huh? I am do glad I am not a stockholder.

Anonymous said...

Welcome to the "I'll Never Buy Anything From Dell Ever Again" Club. I have been a member of the Club for about five years now, ever since I stayed up ALL NIGHT for 8 hours once with their horrendous tech support. They never were able to resolve the problem so I took my computer to a local computer shop and some 17 year old tech support rep solved the problem in 30 SECONDS. Later, the same computer literally caught fire. I switched to ThinkPads and I've never been sorry...

Dell Customer Advocate said...

I am not trying to pull a fast one. The Blogspot account for Dell Customer Advocate has no blogs because it was created specifically to post replies to people with blog accounts here. The duplicate blank blog entries are due to "upgrading" the Blogspot account to newer versions over the last two years. I just haven't taken the time to find out how to delete the "extra" blogs.

I did not receive your email to the customer_advocate@dell.com mailbox. I do not know why that message was not waiting for me this morning and have already started looking into it in order to make sure it is not a symptom of a bigger problem. I see your email is listed in your profile so, if you don't mind, I will email you directly so we can figure out what happened here.

Dell Customer Advocate said...

Just send an email to your GMail account. The subject is "Problems with Dell order/email to Dell". One way or another I'll make sure we get this resolved.

Larry
Dell Customer Advocate