Home
| Calendar
| Mail Lists
| List Archives
| Desktop SIG
| Hardware Hacking SIG
Wiki | Flickr | PicasaWeb | Video | Maps & Directions | Installfests | Keysignings Linux Cafe | Meeting Notes | Linux Links | Bling | About BLU |
I strongly object to being characterized as someone who "did not like the foreign accent". And, based on my own experiences with Dell's support, I think that for most people who disliked Dell's offshoring of their support function, that characterization is wholly inaccurate. I've been a software engineer since my first job writing BASIC interpreters and OS internals at DEC in the 1970s. But by the late 1990s I was a Unix expert, not an MS-DOS or Windows expert. So, although I've never expected Dell's support people to have the same level of understanding of OS concepts that I do, I did expect them to have specific knowledge about Windows that I didn't. And before Dell made their disastrous decision to move support out of the U.S., the level of support met my expectations. When I called them for help, I was able to have an intelligent conversation with the support person handling my call. There was an interactive back-and-forth in the conversation, the result of which was that their knowledge plus my knowledge allowed us to solve my problem. 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. I'd say something and they'd respond with a complete non-sequitur. It took me years to figure out that: 1) they didn't have a clue what I was talking about, and 2) unlike the technical people I know who, when they don't understand what you're saying, will ask you questions until they do understand, Dell's outsourced support people would simply pretend to understand - which behavior inevitably resulted in absurd non-sequiturs, as well as them wasting huge amounts of my time. After a few years of this, I figured out that Dell must have replaced the technically-knowledgeable U.S. support staff that they laid off, with un-knowledgeable but cheap staff, and then tried to make up for that abysmal decision by training them to read pre-written scripts. It was also clear that the outsourced support staff was being incentivized to close calls rather than to solve problems. So they were more than happy to give you a totally unworkable or irrelevant solution as long as they could get you off the line. If you had to call back again 10 times. that was somebody else's problem, not theirs. Since customer objections to the extreme degradation of Dell's service were too often mischaracterized in the same way you just mischaracterized them, as people not liking the foreign accent, management in Round Rock, TX came up with the idiotic solution to simply look for other countries with cheap workers whose English sounded less accented to American ears. So a few years later, I found I was talking to clueless people in the Philippines or in Panama instead of clueless people in India. At some point during a call to Dell's outsourced support, I remembered a Dilbert strip I'd seen years before, in which the support rep tells him to do something ridiculous like reinstall the OS, the next panel shows him twiddling his thumbs, and in the next panel he tells the support rep, "OK, I've done that." When I first saw that strip, I thought it was a funny joke. But after years of frustration with Dell's atrocious time-wasting "service", I stopped thinking of it as a joke and started thinking of it as a strategy. I tried it, and it worked far better than trying to hold an intelligent technical conversation with them. Eventually I started trying to predict the contents of their pre-written script, and figure out which answers would help me navigate them through the shortest path in their script to get to the point where they were willing to send me the particular replacement part I needed. And, given their history of having wasted so much of my time, I no longer felt I needed to zero in on the right replacement part. If I could narrow it down to one of 2 or 3 parts, I was happy to have them ship one part and send a tech out to swap it, and if that didn't work I'd call back and manipulate their script-readers through their script to the next replacement part I wanted to try. With a company that didn't make a business out of wasting my time, it would never have occurred to me to do that. I can't be the only one who figured this out. Over the years, I'm sure Dell must have spent far more money on supporting customers' systems than they could possibly have saved by firing their technically knowledgeable U.S. support staff. And they've also generated a great deal of ill will in the bargain. This is what happens when management manages by the numbers and is totally out of touch with their customers. Mark Rosenthal mbr at arlsoft.com <mailto:mbr at arlsoft.com> On 12/17/2011 9:40 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote: > Just look at Dell. After years of pushing their great support, they > moved it offshore. While my few times when I called Dell support before > they moved it, I was never impressed. But a lot of people did not like > the foreign accent, and this actually caused Michael Dell to take the > reigns of the company again. But, their reputation took a serious hit. >
BLU is a member of BostonUserGroups | |
We also thank MIT for the use of their facilities. |