Dell: Call me patient call me stupid.

Alright so I ordered a 2707 monitor last December from Dell and recieved it very early in January. I'm gonna say first sadly, that I love this monitor.

Albeit, one little thing; I get it out of the box set it up and realize after it gets picture, right in the center of the screen there'a little line of dead pixels. Alright well, my warranty covers that. I contact Dell and go through the entire process, tech agent tells me I'll recieve the new monitor in 3-5 days (not honestly promised by what was included in my warranty but I wasn't going to be picky) when I get the new monitor I set it up make sure everything works fine and within 14 days I'm supposed to package the original monitor into the new monitors box and Dell will have UPS pick it up. Great, I'm thinking this is going to be a really nice simple process.

So I wait.
And I wait.

As I check the orders progress in my account online one day I realize Dell's site doesn't even say the replacement has shipped. It's still in Processing. WTF? This is a day or two after I should have recieved my replacement.

So I start trying to call Dell again, first technical support....half hour of listening to bad music at bad quality while I wait then I get slowly tossed from one agent to the next until finally someone tells me I need to call Customer Service. Well thanks conveniently waiting to tell me that till I gave the same exact information to multiple people. So I move on over to Customer Service expecting better progress till I'm told that I should have contacted Technical Support....

This is literally what happened for somewhere between a week to two weeks of attempted phone calls when I got the opportunity. No matter how many times I told multiple Customer Service representatives that Technical Support told me to contact them it was still always "you have to contact technical support" then I would argue with technical support that I was told by countless Customer Service agents that I needed to contact them, but apparently those countless agents are all wrong because I need to contact customer support.

The kicker for me was a Technical Support agent eventually told me once that I was using the wrong phone number to contact technical support and gave me a different number to dial. So I tried this new number only to have it take me to the same exact automated voice and to have me go throught the same exact repetitive process.

I finally decided to send a lengthy fed up e-mail to both technical support and customer service. Customer Service was the only one to respond.
I'm not going to list down all the communications I had with them.

Just to sum it up I don't believe I ever recieved a response from the same representative twice.

No matter how many times or how forcibly I demanded a supervisor I was always met with "my supervisor will follow the exact same protocol I'm following" and then I'm ignored when I tell them I don't care.

This is where the responses get hilarious to me.
As I'm "trying" to reason with Dell and tell them that my order is stuck in processing and there's something wrong with it, I got a lot of answers that are just screwed up to me.

I was actually told once in an e-mail I received on the 24th of January that I should recieve my monitor on 1/19/2009. This was followed with ahem....

"Please understand that this is just an estimated delivery date and your order might get delivered to you well before the estimated date as well."

Really?....it might get delivered before the 19th?.....a whole week before the day that you're telling me this? Dell you must have some hella amazing engineers if you have time machines at your service.

Eventually I think Dell realized that their estimated delivery date was still listed for the middle of january even though it had now become February and I was still e-mailing them. So they developed the tactic of just pushing the delivery date ahead a whole moth every time. So when I was still bitching at them about it in February they pushed the delivery date from 1/19/2009 to 3/18/2009 and then to 4/8/2009 when I still hadn't recieved anything. I don't remember what it got updated to after that as it doesn't say in the following e-mails.

I would also be told by Customer Service that they had sent an request for the order to be expedited so that I could recieve it as quickly as possible. But, this is the kicker, they explicity told me that it would take 48-72 hours for the concerned department to take action on that request; and I should expect the order to actually ship within 3-5 days. How can they even call it expediting the order if it takes 48-72 hours for the concerned department to even acknowledge the request to expedite the order. It just doesn't make sense to me.

I finally stopped the whole damn thing, I had injured my hand at work previously and was in physical therapy. I finally decided that all the Dell shit was stressing me out too much and I dropped it to concentrate on my physical therapy and my hand.

I had a second surgery just at the end of September, but I shouldn't be having any physical therapy after this one, so I'm back. I'm finally bringing it to forums which I should have done a long time ago.

Supposedly a Supervisor from Customer Service did finally respond to my e-mail when I told them why I had been silent for so long and that I was now back to try and deal with all the shit again, and guess what.
He told me to contact Technical Support.
So I did, when I tried by phone the agent put me on hold for an hour and then I was disconnected.
So I tried by online chat using my service tag code. Well whenever I enter my service tag code Dell tells me that it is for a system purchased outside of the United States and won't let me continute. Someone from customer service told me to just use XXXXXXX instead of my actual service tag while he sorts out the tag issue (I haven't hear back from him on this).
So that's great, the first two days I use the XXX code nothing will load after I use it "Page cannot be displayed' but the third day I get through, great. I get in touch with an agent and he eventually wants to switch me over to another department. Well in the switching it's silent for a long time....and then that individual internet explorer page stops responding. Well I check my e-mail afterward and I have an e-mail with chat log in it. Apparently another agent did try communicating with me but I never recieved any of his messages and he disconnect the link. I don't think this was anything on my end as it had been working perfectly till then and everything else with my internet and computer was still working flawlessly.

On top of that, now when I try to use the XXX code to reenter online chat, I'm told that that code is for a system which has had it's warranty expire...some tv or something and I can't make any further progress.


I'm really failing to understand how this has escalated into such a complicated debacle.

My last e-mail after the xxx code stopped working consisted of me demanding an e-mail for a supervisor in customer service and for a supervisor in technical support so I can stop being bounced around from person to person within the company and I would stop having to explain my entire situation all over again everytime I contact tech support.
I'm waiting for a reply.

I'm really just baffled by this whole thing, but I'm starting to maybe get a sense of security out of it; it's getting to the point where I know I'll never possible be able to go through something as bad as this again..

This sounds exactly like what I went through when I tried to return 2 of their own laptops back to them. They were purchased fraudulently, and they had cleared the charges and everything, but they kept bouncing me around from department to department, back and forth, all telling me they can't do anything. What exactly was I trying to get them to do? Give me a shipping label to return your two laptops.

After 5 hours on the phone, they finally gave me a number to call, which upon calling it... the person who picked up said he was not affiliated with Dell in any way. I stopped there and simply said "OK, we have 2 free laptops now."

DarkScythe said:

This sounds exactly like what I went through when I tried to return 2 of their own laptops back to them. They were purchased fraudulently, and they had cleared the charges and everything, but they kept bouncing me around from department to department, back and forth, all telling me they can't do anything. What exactly was I trying to get them to do? Give me a shipping label to return your two laptops.

After 5 hours on the phone, they finally gave me a number to call, which upon calling it... the person who picked up said he was not affiliated with Dell in any way. I stopped there and simply said "OK, we have 2 free laptops now."

Click to expand...

Wish my order for the 3008wfp I got would have ended that way. I bought mine and the estimated delivery date was like a month later. A 3008wfp showed up on my door step like 3 days later. I went on the website and my 3008wfp purchase was still waiting to be shipped out. About a month after receiving my 3008wfp they finally realized what had happened and sent me the invoice.

Dell is the very epitome of bad private bureaucracy and a massive case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

At least the Federal government has somewhat of an excuse with their slow bureaucracies; they're held accountable to the public and changing political factors.

Dell just sucks with customer service.

Dell Hell

Bring the Dell Dude back.

Yeah, I'll see if I hear back from them this week, they may just be ignoring my e-mails now.

have you tried calling and making a new claim for a replacement? don't tell them about the first one or try to get them to look it up, just tell them you're having the issue with your monitor and you want a replacement. The first replacement order obviously hit a glitch somewhere, try to start fresh with a new replacement order.

If they ask about the first replacement order because they see it in their system say you forgot about it since it was so long ago. The monitor never came and you forgot about it but now the problem has recently gotten worse(at this point I'd say you're entitled to some exaggeration) and you need a replacement.

Your account of Dell customer service reflects in certain aspects my experience of dealing with an Indian department assigned to Dell Australia. In my observation, the people I dealt with demonstrated a lack of training and accountability, ending in department juggling and promises to call you back which aren't honored.

To remedy this, I might suggest that next time you should ask the agent for his phone extension and if he has not yet offered it, his first name. You can probably expedite the process by dealing with this person as much as you can.

Well, I'm supposed to be getting contacted by a manager from Technical Support. The irony is I've started having phone troubles the damn thing just won't stay on.

I gave him an alternative number to reach me by in the evening while I try to get it working again or figure out some easier alternative. In the mean time I guess we'll see if I hear from him.

Send an account of your problems to [email protected], that will go to Michael Dell and you should get a response from somebody in the Executive service department.

Thanks for the e-mail Erasmus, I may still use it.

I finally got in touch with someone middle of last week that said they would set me up with a replacement though.

And it actually arrived this time, nice and spiffy like. They replaced me with a 2709.

I argued with the agent and his supervisor over some form of compensation but they just kept trying to make it sound like they were doing me a favor by sending me a replacement
I guess thanks for doing what should have been done in January.

They never said anything about returning the previous monitor to me on the phone, though there is a slip in the box it came in. I had been thinking if they didn't care about recieving the old one maybe that would be enough for me, so I've just been waiting to see if I get contacted by them.

I don't really feel it's unfair of me to expect to be compensated for this in some way. I'm just happy to have a replacement finally though, so I'm not really sure if I want to pursue it any further if they contact me. I'm tired....