[Discuss] WRT Dell trashing their own reputation by offshoring support to India [Was: Justify your existence]

[Kyle Leslie]

At my last job it was an all Dell shop. It was extremely frustrating dealing with the script. We eventually got to the point if we knew the issue and needed a part replaced (mostly hard drives) we figured out what codes or errors to tell them that was wrong to speed the process of getting a part. 

It was always extremely frustrating to answer various useless questions to "fix" something that I knew needed to be replaced anyways. 

I hated having to call Dells support but I will say this once you get through the garbage they are good about replacing your equipment. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 17, 2011, at 2:45 PM, "Dave Gavin" <dgavin at davegavin.com> wrote:

> 
> My experience with the DELL off-shore support was that they seemed to
> have a script and could not diverge from it. The folks I talked to always
> seemed to be non-technical and refused to escalate until we got through
> their entire script. I eventually adopted the tactic of agreeing and
> "Yup, did that - didn't work" as someone else suggested to get to someone
> who could hopefully help. I quickly gave up on DELL support and have
> found online forums and mailing lists (particularly this one) MUCH more
> helpful in solving problems.
>  I was shocked when calling one of our service providers about an outage
> when I got a very knowledgeable person who spoke quite clearly - it
> turned out that he was in Nova Scotia !
> 
> Dave
> 
> -- 
> "This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever."
> - Sigmund Freud (speaking about the Irish)
> 
> On Sat, December 17, 2011 2:18 pm, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>> On 12/17/2011 11:55 AM, MBR wrote:
>>> After Dell fired their U.S. support people and outsourced the function
>>> to India, I found it impossible to have an intelligent conversation
>>> with their support people.  During my calls to them over the first few
>>> years after they did that, I naively assumed the support people were
>>> technically knowledgeable, and I continued trying to engage them in
>>> technical conversation to solve my problem, but that was always
>>> impossible.
>> My experience with Dell was very spotty since I have no Dell stuff, and
>> it was only for a friend or client.
>> "I found it impossible to have an intelligent conversation with their
>> support people"
>> This is the key. You want to be able to have an intelligent conversation
>> with a support person and to be able to understand. I had a few times to
>> contact Compaq support (before HP). I found back then that the Indians
>> were much more technically competent that the non-Indians. On a single
>> issue, I had a couple of US people who gave me the wrong answers, where
>> when I spoke to an Indian, he gave me exactly what fixed the problem.
>> 
>> First, many people have trouble with some foreign accents, and I believe
>> that this was one of the major Dell user complaints. Whoever you speak
>> to should be reasonably articulate and easily understandable.
>> Second, the person should be knowledgeable enough to either identify and
>> solve your problem or escalate it to someone who does.
>> 
>> My recent conversation with the RCN customer service person was that he
>> told me:
>> 1. While I paid for a "static IP", since you had only a single static IP
>> it was only a sticky and he refused to budge.
>> 2. We were paying for an 8-IP subnet not a single static.
>> The issue comes under that category of intelligent conversation. I had
>> the bill in my hand. What they failed to do was to move the subnet over
>> from the 20/2 DOCSIS 1 modem to the DOCSIS 3 modem as was required by
>> the contract. My problem is I had a SonicWall that could only be
>> programmed by our IT department. The only thing I could have done was to
>> do a factory reset, get it on some working network, and then let IT
>> reprogram it.  I told him that, but I didn't tell him that I had 2 other
>> networks in the same computer room. In any case they finally fixed the
>> problem after I yelled and screamed.
>> 
>> The bottom line is it does not matter where the support people are. It
>> is a matter of training.
>> 
>> --
>> Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
>> Boston Linux and Unix
>> PGP key id:3BC1EB90
>> PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66  C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90
>> 
>> 
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