New York Sues Dell for Poor Customer Service

Phanatic1a writes "New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is suing Dell, alleging bait and switch financing tactics, false advertising, and 'numerous other deceptive business practices relating to their technical support services, promotional financing, rebate offers, and billing and collection activity.' According to Cuomo himself, 'At Dell, customer service means no service at all.'"

I know why

[Nate Fox]

sounds like someone didnt pay for the Gold support. ALWAYS pay for it. Or use another vendor, its your money!

Deceptive business practices?

[ChromeAeonium]

Like bragging about their customer support, but then when you do call them up, you get some foreign person with an accent you can't understand talking over a phone connection that makes him barely audible, that you can only speak to after being redirected for a few hours, and who will then tell you your hard drive needs replaced because there's something wrong with the fan in your power supply? That may not be illegal, but it would be nice if they changed that.

Re:I know why

[KlomDark]

Prices are high on gas because the cost of production is high? How do you back up that statement? Gas is high because of massive mismanagement, inadequate processing facilities, and large amounts of capacity being offline for either shoddy maintenance (Pipelines rusting out) or really sketchy reasons. (The big facility in Oklahoma explodes because of a lightning strike? These people never heard of lightning rods and proper grounding? If there's no oxygen supply in a big tank, then you can hit it with lightning all day long and nothing can ignite.)

This is all bullshit caused by the deregulation of the industry. Look how well deregulation of the energy market worked for California, rolling blackouts, raging high prices, etc. Required public services needed for the basic functionality of our society should NEVER be deregulated, cause all it does is let unethical traders get rich of scamming the whole system.

I know, all you "free market" clones will fry me for stating the obvious, but the free market doesn't exist without government regulation in the first place. Free market is just an euphemism for "quick buck", not a long term, stable solution.

Re:Big surprise from Dell !?!

[epiphani]

Actually, it DOES come as a surprise to me. Maybe because I'm in Canada, but Dell's support has always been top notch for me.

Just two weeks ago, I called up and said my laptop was randomly rebooting a bluescreening, that I'd swapped the ram with no avail, and I wanted a new motherboard and ram. They had a technician come to my office the next day, and after an hour I got a laptop with a brand new motherboard and ram.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but that experience alone has convinced me that I won't be purchasing a laptop elsewhere.

RTFA, the lawsuit really is NOT about CustService

[drhamad]

It's really about bait & switch tactics in their finance arm, attracting people with 0% offers then denying even those with good credit, making them pay 20% or more finance fees. "The lawsuit accuses Dell of luring consumers to purchase its products with advertisements that offered attractive "no interest" and/or "no payment" financing promotions. In practice, however, the vast majority of consumers, even those with very good credit scores, were denied these deals. In a classic "bait and switch" scheme, DFS instead offered consumers financing at high interest rates, which often exceed 20%. Dell and DFS frequently failed to clearly inform these consumers that they had not qualified for the promotional terms, leaving many to unwittingly finance their purchase at high interest rates." THAT is what it is really about. The rest is just to throw on a little more on top, to scare Dell, and more importantly to make the public support it.

Re:I know why

[truthsearch]

The question is why the hell is it the AG's job to sue somebody for poor service?

http://www.oag.state.ny.us/consumer/consumer_issue s.html [state.ny.us]:

The Bureau of Consumer Frauds and Protection prosecutes businesses and individuals engaged in fraudulent, misleading, deceptive or illegal trade practices. In addition to litigating, the Bureau mediates thousands of complaints each year from individual consumers. A large percentage of these complaints are resolved satisfactorily through the mediation process. As part of its mission, the Bureau provides information to consumers and seeks to ensure a fair and vigorous market place. The Bureau also drafts legislation and conducts studies and writes reports on emerging consumer problems and issues.

Who is the customer?

[ISoldat53]

The State of NY is one of Dell's biggest government customers.

Re:I know why

[benzapp]

Evidence of what? dell has bad service? thats not hard to come by... The question is why the hell is it the AG's job to sue somebody for poor service? Does not NY have some real problems to deal with?

Yes they do, but fixing those problems are long-term issues that are outside the scope of democracy. The State of New York faces enormous future budget shortfalls as government workers retire and the entire vote-buying apparatus of the state bureaucracy comes crashing to the ground.

Democrats previously gained votes by promoting "social" programs like welfare, public housing, and other such initiatives. Government workers account for a full 17% of the workforce in New York State. When you consider that nearly 50% of the population (NOT the workforce) receive public assistance, you begin to see the problems for the Democratic Party.

They can no longer establish a plutocracy by stealing from the hardworking citizenry of the state. More people take from the state's coffers than donate to it. The game of throwing the people's money around to buy votes is over.

So what is a democrat to do?

Something... ANYTHING... that doesn't cost money. And this is an example of that.

Dell Server Support != Dell Desktop Support

[jimicus]

Do not confuse Dell's server support with their desktop support. Servers make Dell money. Desktops make them well-known.

I don't know how it works in other parts of the world, but here in the UK the routine is:

1. Call Dell Technical Support.
2. Give the service tag to the call handler (always sounds like an Indian accent, but ICBW).
3. If the service tag refers to a desktop/laptop, regardless of the level of support, it goes to India and deal with the communication issues that so often seems to entail. Server calls go to Ireland and communication issues are non-existent.
4. The level of support you've paid for now comes into play. Depending on what you've chosen, parts may be drop-shipped within 4 hours and an engineer should arrive to fit them also within that time, or an engineer will arrive next day - or, if you're a cheapskate, you'll have to ship the item back to Dell at your own expense and it'll come back to you when it comes back. Customers with a Gold (24x7) contract can also ask their account manager for the telephone number of the appropriate team which is manned 24 hours a day, rather than the number on the website which cuts over to a recorded message after working hours to say "please call back tomorrow".

And yes, I have made support calls under such contracts with Dell and also with other companies. In my experience, as soon as you're talking about real hardware rather than desktop PCs and you're paying real money for the support, the level of service you get is not bad.

You're using a BS argument.

[raehl]

Look how well deregulation of the energy market worked for California

The California energy market was NEVER deregulated. They just changed the regulations. And when they changed the regulations, companies like Enron figured out how to exploit the new rules in order to get profit for doing nothing.

Basically, when California's energy market was 'deregulated', new rules were put in place that set the cost of power based on congestion - the more demand there was for the power lines over which the power was transmitted, the more money you paid for that power.

So the energy companies just moved power around essentially in circles, creating more artificial demand, and inflating the cost of power.

If the California energy market had been ACTUALLY deregulated, California's utilities wouldn't have been forced by regulation to pay too much for power, and there would have been more than enough power at reasonable prices to go around because the statutory incentive for the power distribution companies to artificially inflate demand wouldn't have existed.

So, in short, it was REGULATIONS that caused the rolling blackouts, NOT a lack of them.

Service Level

[lamarguy91]

I'm not sure how many of the /. crowd are familiar with the concept of service level, so I figured I'd pass this along:

For any company that is worth a flip, they measure a statistic called service level. When you call a customer service number for a company, all of the calls are tracked on their telephony switches. I'm sure everyone is familiar with having to wait on hold to talk to someone. The actual metric of service level is "the target of answering X percent of calls in X seconds or less". So to measure this, if Company A has a service level goal of 80% answered in 45 seconds, and by chance they answered all of their calls for the day in 45 seconds or less, they have achieved 100% for the day. (This would technically be cost inefficient because they had too many people answering the phones, but I'll save that for another day). In this example, the company wants to end up at an 80% achievement for the day. They hit 100%, so they overserviced. Good for the customer, bad for the company's budget.

Depending on the industry, service level targets range anywhere from 80%/45 seconds for credit cards, home/cell phones, etc. Industries like sales, product activations, etc. have a much higher percentage, such as 90%/20 seconds... If the user is trying to buy something, a long wait time makes the customer impatient and they'll hang up resulting in a lost sale opportunity. For industries like computer tech support, the service levels are much, much different. A call for a computer user is going to be much longer than someone who calls their credit card company to complain about an over-the-limit fee. For tech support type calls, the service level will usually be something in the neighborhood of 70%/240 seconds.

You may be wondering how this relates to the Dell story? Last bit of information I received (approx. a month ago), Dell's computer tech support service level was 60%/20 MINUTES. Yes, that is minutes, not seconds. This means that if they answer 60% of their tech calls in 20 minutes or less, they feel they are providing a proper service to their customer.

I'm not surprised in the slightest to see this lawsuit. I'm actually surprised to see that is has taken this long.

Re:"Free Market" is an abused term

[magarity]

"Free market" implies that there is no single party or group that has control over a market
 
Admirably close but still not quite: a free market is one in which no one player has control of the supply AND all the players have the exact same information. A large part of what makes cartels effective is that they share information with each other that the rest of the market doesn't get to know.

Re:I know why

[pete-classic]

I worked in Dell support many years ago. Based on the summary it sounded like support had really gone down hill since then. There were really two types of issues described in the fine article: financing and support.

The financing complaints all sound totally legitimate.

The support stuff all sounds like the same old stuff people griped about when I worked there. People griped about this stuff because they didn't read their support contract. Both parties have their end to hold up. In my personal experience, Dell balks at supporting customers who refuse to hold up their end. Yes, this means removing the cover from the PC to troubleshoot. Yes, this means determining what's wrong with the machine over the phone before sending out an on-site tech. Yes, this means you're getting refurbished service parts. These things are all part of how Dell makes money and keeps prices competitive. No one has to take the deal. But once you accept it you can't expect to change the rules to suit your preferences.

-Peter

Re:Whatever....

[tacokill]

Dude, if you did not know - while filling out the credit application - that you would be charged a 29.9% APR, then that's your fault. I won't back down from that statement. If, however, Dell did not disclose this (and you asked), then you have a criminal case against them and that is called fraud.

Somehow, I doubt the latter is true but if it is, I recant what I said. You never mentioned fraud or any kind of criminal investigation so I can only assume you entered into an agreement that you did not fully take the time to understand. By law, any debtor has to disclose shit like this. APR's, fees, billing cycle, etc. It all has to be disclosed before you sign the agreement. Sorry if you missed that part but it was probably there....

Look, don't take it personally. The dress-down you got would have been given to anyone who said the same thing. Just realize that there are lots of people on the other side who DO understand this stuff and they will be more than happy to provide that legal 'service' at 29%, regardless of whether you read the agreement or not. And in 100 out of 100 times, they will become wealthier and you will become poorer. Your tone implies that you can remain ignorant and the world should still take care of you. While a nice ideal, it is a long way from reality. You must protect yourself - and that means doing your homework before you enter into agreements with anyone or anything.

In simplest terms, "a fool and his money are easily parted". The lesson there is: don't be a fool. And anyone who enters into any kind of financing at 29% APR is a fool, unless they are buying something that appreciates at 30% or better. And Dell computers most certainly do not do that.

Re:Yawn yawn

[cerberusss]

If you buy a machine from dell, and it comes pre-loaded with software

I don't understand the fuss with the preinstalled crap. You buy the machine, boot it, menu -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs. Install Firefox, remove the IE icon.