New York Sues Dell for Poor Customer Service 295
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.'"
Dude (Score:5, Funny)
Unlike Corporations. (Score:2)
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Huge corporations who buy a lot of product from a vendor will often have an engineer or two (or more) assigned to them specifically. That person may even
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I shouldn't have to spend hours coaxing a guy on the phone through his troubleshooting manual until he gets the
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I have to deal with Dell on a regular basis. Not because I know jack about computers, but because I have to go through them to get parts under warranty (or worse, not under warranty and proprietary). Their crap is ALWAYS breaking. This year we're up to at least 4 monitors, 3 hard drives, some RAM, laptop battery, laptop motherboard, and
Corporation Baiting (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't even think (Score:2, Funny)
Cuomo, huh (Score:2, Funny)
Deceptive business practices? (Score:5, Informative)
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My first thought when I connected to him was that it's very hard to type with an accent. Wasn't the most clueful tech in the business, but he was apparently sitting next to one who was. Which is good enough.
Gold support or nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
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I find that I spend the next hour verifying "who is the owner of this machine," "Where do they live," "Please give me enough identification to steal the owners identity please" so that the 5 minute diagnosis takes over an hour to resolve. For a $5 part. That still has to be sent back to Dell.
Mmm... that sounds annoying enough that it might actually dissuade people from calling up altogether, don't you think?
I usually don't even bother calling Dell support for clients with non-gold support. Buying new hardware at OverpricedShack (tm) is usually cheaper that the time it will take Dell to replace it.
Only if it starts seriously affecting the bottom line, or they get seriously hammered in court will Dell change this; and regardless of what they claim, there is always a large percentage of people who will buy almost exclusively on price and only change
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Dell Server Support != Dell Desktop Support (Score:3, Informative)
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. S
Not so bad. (Score:4, Insightful)
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I bought a Dell 2405FPW monitor early on in the production run and it had this nasty habbit of making a high pitched noise and shutting off about four hours after it was turned on in the morning. So I did some googling and found out that this was caused by overheating. So I did what any geek would do and placed a fan so as to cool the beasty this gave me a good 10 hour run before it would shut itself off. But the problem was fixed in revision 3 of the hardware and
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And how is dell doing these days? (Score:2)
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Yawn yawn (Score:2)
Re:Yawn yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
When I purchased my car (a honda actually), I had the dealership install an after market remote starter. When I had trouble, guess who I brought it to. Guess who fixed it ? The dealership.
Now, had I bought it from Best Buy I would have brought it back to Best Buy.
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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.
Dell Financial Services (Score:5, Interesting)
Whatever.... (Score:5, Insightful)
My question to you is this: why in the fuck are you buying a depreciating consumer item when you do not have the money to afford it?
I really, truly, do not understand some people's financial decisions. Leasing cars, paying ridiculously high APR's....and then wondering why, after all these years of hard work, they are poor.
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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 fu
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Apathy... (Score:5, Funny)
If we don't take care of the customers, maybe they will stop bugging us.
Why single Dell out? (Score:5, Interesting)
Had the misfortune to call Linksys recently too. An entire Saturday wasted going through the first-layer support morons, who were just reading the scripts from their screens. Some of them — reading so slowly, I could not help thinking, they are on drugs. Others — lying that the supervisor is "on a meeting"...
Finally, someone had brains enough to realize, the problem is above his level and transfered me to the second level support person, who quickly understood, what I was saying all along, and proceeded to tell me, how to cold-reset the wonder Linux-router, which promptly fixed the problem — 6 hours after the first phone call to Linksys...
Don't know, if any amount of legal prosecution can help against this sort of moronity.
The main legal beef of this prosecution, I guess, are the (alleged) financing/collection irregularities — a heavily legislated and regulated area. The populist "no service at all" rhethorics are just thrown in to help Mr. Guomo repeat Mr. Spitzer's feat later on...
Re:Why single Dell out? (Score:5, Funny)
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Pathetic, Im so glad I left NY! (Score:3, Insightful)
Who is the customer? (Score:2, Informative)
Sounds great, who's next? (Score:2, Interesting)
How about...
COMCAST - Customer service is non-existent. Advertised cable-internet speeds are excessively exaggerated. Bills constantly increase, yet service level goes down. They even have the balls to ADVERTISE on their own guide system. If they're making advertising money by putting ads on my screen while I'm browsing channels, that should be money OFF my bill, not added to it.
VERIZON
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"You pay 150% per day or I send the boys round to break both your legs"
I agree with your point tho, I remember when Mobile phones were just arriving in the UK and you would get 9 month contracts, now a phone company wants a year atleast and tries for 18 months if they can get it.
I'm not sure how it works in USA but in the UK I find the magic words "I'm taking you to the small claims court" works wonders, that will generally open door
You know, the solution is obvious (Score:4, Funny)
Having dealt with NY state services (Score:4, Insightful)
Dell is learning (Score:2)
Think Dell is Bad? Try Compaq (Score:2)
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RTFA, the lawsuit really is NOT about CustService (Score:5, Informative)
Re:RTFA, the lawsuit really is NOT about CustServi (Score:2)
But now let's go after other such practices like Rent-To-Own and Rent-A-Center.
Doesn't look good for HP, Lenovo, Sony, etc... (Score:2)
If someone thinks that customer service is bad with Dell, they are going to think it is universally bad and all computer makers need to be sued. Sadly, not very realistic.
How is it this happens only in NY? (Score:2)
Lack of service or double-evil financing practices can be assumed with most big businesses. Dell isn't even the tip of an iceberg, it's an ice cube from the tip of an iceberg.
I'd really like to hear some opinions as to why other states aren't doing the same.
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i'm not going to nominate Dell for saint hood, but there are far worse companies out there.
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Nit: I'm fairly sure NYC is the biggest media market in the US. It's probably in the top 5 worldwide.
spitzer won in a landslide election for governor largely because he got his mug on the cover of time magazing for suing some people.
It probably helped that Pataki did not run. I think Spitzer would have unseated him anyway, but it would likely have been a good deal closer.
On-line chat (Score:2, Insightful)
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(or at least that's the case in the two times I've tried it)
Me Too (Score:2)
However, I recommend to the many people who ask me to help them buy/upgrade their PCs that they just call Dell. Because those people mostly n
Dell Outsourcing to India (Score:3, Interesting)
When are companies going to understand that they may get a first time buyer with their cut-rate prices. But if that buyer ever has a problem with the hardware and receives cut-rate support, they are not going to buy from the same company again.
Just one reason I buy HP.
h
Three simple rules (Score:2)
2. Be healthy.
3. Do not buy small items that will not last more than three years with credit.
If you really need to finance $800, perhaps you should not be buying it. As far as I am concerned, Dell provides cheap hardware that performs relatively well for its price. What they do with their financing is really not that bad considering that private banks charge through the roof for college loans.
Dell for bad biz practices? How 'bout Brooklyn... (Score:2)
FWIW, I paid for business level support on my laptop, and with very few exceptions have had nothing but quick response from fairly knowledgable reps.
she paid for in home (Score:2, Interesting)
Service Level (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Dell More Inept Than Criminal (Score:3, Interesting)
Inaccurate headline... (Score:2, Interesting)
Their technical support on the other hand really isn't all that bad if you know what to ask for. (Of course we do pay for premium) It's not as good as Sun's tech support but I've had much worst response issues with companies like Gateways 2000 PCs back when I w
Tech Support and Customers (Score:4, Insightful)
Me Too (also) (Score:2, Funny)
Please.Stop (Score:2, Interesting)
Now that's bad press. (Score:2)
"At Dell, customer service means no service at all." - Attorney General of the State of New York.
Now that's bad press. Visualize that on a billboard, or in a competitor's commercial.
yay Dell horror stories! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I know why (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I know why (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.oag.state.ny.us/consumer/consumer_issu
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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
Re:I know why (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:I know why (Score:5, Informative)
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.
"Free Market" is an abused term (Score:5, Interesting)
"Free market" implies that there is no single party or group that has control over a market, not just governments. A single company (e.g. Microsoft in the OS space), or a cartel (e.g., the RIAA member companies) that can dictate the vast bulk of a market's behavior thus means the market is no longer free or capable of the self-correcting behavior that are the benefits of a free market.
Gas prices are high because a single cartel, OPEC, dictates the price per barrel. This is not a free market.
California's "deregulation" was more appropriately a "re-regulation," and was only called "deregulation" for marketing purposes. It failed to help end consumers, of course, because they really don't have a choice where their power comes from; there's no way to go to the corner store and buy a few kilowatt-months to take home and keep in the fridge til ya need them. In other words, it's a market that is necessarily never free, because you always have one company controlling delivery.
It keeps being used only in the sense of "no government interference," which is just wrong. Maybe that's an accepted meaning, but since a market dominated by any entity or cartel cannot be free and does not have the benefits of a really free market, then
Well, partially. (Score:4, Insightful)
Price of a barrel of oil is only one component of the price of a gallon of gas. In the US, the price of gas is much more closely related to the supply of refined gasoline vs. the demand for refined gasoline. Presently, there is about a $1 swing between the price of a gallon of gas in the winter and in the summer. Every year. Does the price of a barrel of oil swing by $20 from the winter to the summer?
No, it doesn't.
Does OPEC reduce oil production by 25% in the summer?
No, they don't.
So what accounts for the swing in gas prices?
Supply and demand. We only have a finite amount of refining capacity. In the summer, demand goes up, but supply does not - there is no more refining capacity available.
The real culprit in the high gas prices are the oil companies and environmentalists. Oil companies don't want to invest their profits in more refining capacity, and environmentalists make it difficult to build new refineries at all.
OPEC, on the other hand, doesn't like high gas prices any more than you do - the higher the gas price, the more attractive alternate energy sources become. And if there's one thing OPEC definitely doesn't want, it's people investing in ways to use less gas.
Nope, you missed it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong. OPEC's goal is to keep PROFITS high. Getting the highest profits does NOT result from arbitrarily high prices. But, when producers collaborate, the price at which profit is maximized is higher than where it would be if producers competed. THAT's the goal of a cartel - eliminate downward price pressure caused by competition.
But, even the cartel has long and short term pressures on the oil price. In the short term, if the price goes too high, they move past the optimum point, the decreased volume of sales is not offset by the increased margin, and their profits actually go down. And even if they are at the optimal short-term price point for maximizing profits, in the LONG term, if the short-term price is so high that other people start investing in technology that ultimately reduces the demand for oil, then again, OPEC loses out on profits because in 5 or 10 years, everyone's car runs Ethanol or Vegetable Oil and demand for oil plummets. One of the big reasons we don't have more alternative energy now is that comparatively, gas has been cheap, so there wasn't any incentive to develop something else.
OPEC wants high profits - but to get high profits over the long term, they want to keep oil prices reasonable in the short term to discourage investment in alternative energy sources.
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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.
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You're using a BS argument. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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i have worked with oil compaines and if you could see how much it costs - you would realize that that is not by any means the reason why gas is expensive
Re:I know why (Score:4, Informative)
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
Why is this a problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
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You can sue for poor service? (Score:2, Insightful)
How about Comcast for the undisclosed limits on downloads even with "unlimited" service? Or Microsoft over the Microsoft tax you end up paying on new computers unless you jump through tons of hoops. Or Paypal for, well, the tons of crap they've put people through.
Or any of the other places that give you crappy service; I'm sure Slashdotters could come up with a pretty long list...
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I've dealt with standard, silver, and gold support, and they're all crappy. I've had to get our regional corporate IT director involved on more than one occasion...I mean literally, this guy is 2 steps below the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, and I'm having to have him PERSONALLY intervene in a support issue and threaten to pull ou
Geek Squad (Score:3, Interesting)
They replaced a DVD writer that failed, and a keyboard (the P fell off while I was typing). My biggest complaint was that when I picked up my laptop, I needed to wait for about 40 minutes. No geeks were in sight most of that time.
Re:Geek Squad (Score:5, Insightful)
Best Buy is actually a good place to buy computers, as long as they're low quality. Why? Their extended warranty has a "three strikes and you're out clause" whereby after the computer has been serviced three times, if it breaks again they give store credit for a replacement. So, the procedure is as follows:
My family went through this cycle about five times over about the past decade, starting with a refurbished Packard Bell 486 desktop and ending with a 20" iMac Core Duo (and no, we did not break anything on purpose, or be overly rough with our machines). Also, I don't count Apple as "crappy," although it should be noted that Best Buy replaces Macs on the first service instead of the fourth, because it doesn't have the facilities to repair them.
Re:Geek Squad (Score:4, Insightful)
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3rd party repair facilities can't get documentation for the no-name crap monitors Best Buy sells. So if you don't have a warranty, you have to just buy a new one. If you have a warranty, you take it in, they put it on a truck, send it back to the manufacturer, and they fix the $5 problem and return it.
Re:I've always been pretty happy with Dell (Score:4, Interesting)
In USA, the customer is without rights in most cases and the corporations can do what the heck they want. Not to mention they can tell you lies without consequences. Example: The stupid commercial fro free credit reports. $30 or more per month is the cost for those "free" reports. Free, my ass.
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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
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