Dell support has flown a repair guy to my place with spare hardware pieces and fixed my pc in front of me. In my office.
And I was partially to blame for the problem (I over clocked the CPU). I told them I did oc the CPU, they changed motherboard and processor anyways. For free.
So not only there are other verticals, but they are better.
The same Dell sold me a new monitor through their Amazon store, and when it broke a few months later — as that model became infamous for — Dell refused to replace it because their inventory system claimed I wasn’t the first owner: https://honeypot.net/2021/02/19/dell-doesnt-honor.html
Funny how experiences with the same company can be so drastically different. You got white glove service. I got service so bad that I used my veto power to keep an employer from ever spending a single penny with them.
Oh, sure. They’re not going to fly someone out to fix a retail customer’s monitor. I get that and would never expect that level of service.
And yet, they doubled down hard on refusing to replace my defective 6 month old, still under warranty, screen. Amazon was the hero in this story. They listened to my story and gave me a refund, which I spent with a different brand.
It felt wonderful explaining to their enterprise rep why we were rejecting their bid and going with a different vendor.
Ah yes. I've also had the joy of telling off a professional account manager because of piss-poor consumer support (in my case, it was DHL). It's a great feeling :)
Could this be because of Amazon's "commingling" [1], where they throw products ordered from different stores all in one big pile, mixing the counterfeits with the real ones?
All of these companies have good and bad stories. I’ve been in the IT biz for a long time and have lots of stories of heroics and villainy.
I can think of a bad one where a significant number of laptops and 1st party docking stations were deployed. There was an issue where in certain scenarios plugging into the dock would brick the dock. It affected ~5% of the population in 90 days. Vendor response: fuck you.
One of the interns working on desktop support at the org figured out that certain laptop serial number ranges were affected. She then popped it open and found what turned out to be a counterfeit chip.
Flying monkeys were released and the CEO of the vendor got a call. End result: ~$40-50M redeployment of everything, eaten by the vendor. If they had been accountable from the beginning, they likely would have recalled $3-5M of devices and spent $300-500k on deployment.
On the flip, I remember one scenario where an off warranty device failed before its replacement was ready (and the replacement was another vendor). The part wasn’t available locally, and the account exec ditched a conference in Chicago, picked up the part from a depot in Indiana and drove it to Massachusetts overnight, with a CE waiting for it in the lot.
It’s almost like what really matters when something goes wrong is who responds to the incident. There are individual human beings who genuinely give a shit about customer service, and will move heaven and earth in order to help customers. And then there are other individual human beings who want to do as little as possible, when confronted with an issue, and blaming the customer is often the shortest route to minimal work.
It really doesn’t matter what the organization’s policies and procedures are. At most, an organization’s culture may affect this, by nudging marginal cases to align with the culture. But in the end, it always comes down to individual human beings.
We just had a similar oopsie (water ingress) happen with a very expensive Dell server. We were upfront about what happened and wanted to pay for service. But in the end, they deployed a tech to repair it under warranty anyway.
Yeah I know about their extended warranty; then their responsiveness is obviously due to the extended warranty, not any comparative admission of liability.
As to "Dell support has flown a repair guy to my place with spare hardware pieces ". You don't know that he wasn't already planning to fly to your area for 5+ other customers anyway. Also it's a less impressive story if you live in a heavily tech area than if you live in the Ozarks. Flights can often be cheaper than driving, and the rep has less dead/travel time and can service other customers or whatever.
I looked at Dell extended warranties before (can be ~about as expensive as the machine itself, over 3yrs) and figured that if you're buying with your own money, you can do better with due diligence on which specific year-models are/aren't reliable and what each component costs to replace, also couple that with a selective backup strategy. As long as you're not too remote.
> As to "Dell support has flown a repair guy to my place with spare hardware pieces ". You don't know that he wasn't already planning to fly to your area for 5+ other customers anyway.
I can tell you that wasn't the case because it was a small town that had a small airport. And they sent the guy next-day from my report. He told me he just flew for my issue and was returning on the same day.
If it was some large city or capital, they probably wouldn't have needed to fly the tech guy anyway. Someone would have probably been available nearby.
As for the price, perhaps it changes for different hardware, but for customer PCs you can see for yourself, it's around ~$45 per year. Which was free for me because of promo.
My mum had a Dell laptop whose power supply died after a few years. This was during the era when seemingly every model had a different supply. Dell essentially said "sorry, we don't make those anymore or have any remaining in stock, you're on your own".
It was a low-end one (their now-dead 'Vostro' brand), which may explain the service difference, I suppose.
We use dell a lot where I work. Their fault rates aren’t noticeably better than others but their ability to fix problems is much better. Bios updates are provided well past warranty periods and the hardware they use is well supported by non-windows operating systems.
Last five pcs and laptops I bought personally were all Dell. Latest latitude I bought worked with OpenBSD with no issues.
Dell support has flown a repair guy to my place with spare hardware pieces and fixed my pc in front of me. In my office. And I was partially to blame for the problem (I over clocked the CPU). I told them I did oc the CPU, they changed motherboard and processor anyways. For free.
So not only there are other verticals, but they are better.