Branding David

So, five more days have gone by, and due in part to my special circumstances of not having a home phone line, I haven’t been able to talk to the representative they’ve set up to help me with the problems my wife is having with the Dell laptop that I bought her.

I have since bought a cell phone, so that should help. And I’ve been contacting them as often as I can through Skype, but every time I call, Sunny is on another call.

I am getting more and more frustrated, and each time I talk to my wife, she mentions about how quickly the laptop is degrading. Now, the screen is dim most of the time, with it only going to a normal brightness when she presses on the frame near the hinge. She just told me today that we should send it back, and they’ll be able to see the issue no matter what this time but she forgets how narrow minded the technicians are at Dell. They’ll fix the cable for the back light display, but probably won’t look to fix whatever is shorting out on the wrist rest area or the other weird quirks that her laptop is quickly picking up.

I truly believe that we received a lemon for a Dell and that we should receive a replacement with the same features. The laptop isn’t very old, and so I assume they still have one sitting around. My wife wouldn’t even care if it had slightly less hard drive space, or was slightly slower, as long as it was mostly comparable. The goal of course is to get a machine that is built right and that will make her happy.

The longer this goes on, the more layers I am exposed to within Dell’s corporate structure, the more frustrated I get. I still believe that Dell has good products, but that they do sometimes have build quality issues that need to be resolved quickly. The reason why Dell gets so much bad press isn’t because their products suck, but instead because their support in dealing with products that don’t work is poor.

Had Dell been wise enough to vigorously test the laptop when we sent it the first time, I am sure they would have come across our issue and been able to fix or replace the components with issues. Then all of this fall out, and negative press that I am working so hard to write, would have never occurred, and I would have continued to sing their praises.

Skipping over that, if Dell had been wise enough to put me in touch with someone that could instantly just ship out a replacement unit of similar specs, and taken back the one that I had issues with, they could have reconditioned it, and sold it as a discount. Their loss on this exchange would have been noticeable, but the good will would have been huge.

Now, I am sitting here, frustrated that I still don’t have a working laptop for my wife, and she starts school in a week, and all of this goes back to Dell not being able to solve an issue that was brought to their attention more than a month ago.

Previously, I posted the update to the original post, but I think everything that has happened since deserves another post to itself. Read the original post entitled “Frustration With Dell” for more details surrounding my issues.

After using Twitter to contact Lionel Menchaca, the chief blogger for Dell, as well as someone I’ve run into a few times at various new media/blogging related events, I was told he would contact someone in Canada to help me get this resolved. Without Lionel and others like him in Dell, I fear the company would long since have died.

Lionel wasn’t able to quickly contact someone in Canada, and I waited patiently for almost a month, messaging him on Twitter nearly every week for any status update.

Eventually, I received a call at home when I wasn’t there. Sunny Sharma then e-mailed me to let me know that they tried to get in contact with me via the phone.

Here is the full text of that e-mail.

Dear Mr. David Peralty,

This is in reference to your email received at Dell. First of all, I would like to thank you for taking time to make us aware of this issue, Also I apologise for the inconvenience you had to go through in this regards. I tried calling you today to discuss the issue and as you were not available I left a voice mail for you. Please provide me with the alternate contact # and so that we can discuss this issue. I can also be reached at the number mentioned below.

Regards,
Sunny Sharma

Ph: 1-800-387-5757, Options 1,1&2 Ext 53 – 75193
Working Hrs : Mon to Fri (9:00am to 6:00pm EST)

Finally, I might have someone that can help me resolve this whole mess. Since this whole thing began, the issues my wife has been complaining about for months have worsened. The screen issue that I originally sent the unit in for comes back from time to time, especially when opening or closing the unit, and when you rest your palms on the area below the keyboard, it causes strange things to happen when you are typing, as I mentioned in my previous post.

The computer has also become very finicky about wireless Internet connections. Overall, the angry comments from my wife have been getting worse, and my own use of the machine has caused numerous explicit words to be shouted.

I feel like we were sold a lemon, and thus far the support has pretty much ignored us, only making the situation worse and souring us on the brand.

I am looking forward to seeing what Sunny has to say about the whole thing, but I am worried I will be dealing with another technician that will think I am just another customer with a bad case of PEBKAC.

Someone mentioned to me recently that it is pretty shameful that I have to contact specific people within Dell to get a reasonable response to my problem, and to them, I just want to say that the only way to get a potentially satisfactory resolution as a customer when you are unhappy is to hound a company until they either give you the answer you are looking for, or teach you to never be a customer of theirs again.

Over ten people per year ask me which company they should buy their laptops for, and thanks in large part to my personal experience with certain people at Dell (@LionelatDell), and the various blogging efforts they’ve done, I’ve been recommending them. Unfortunately, their involvement in the blogosphere says nothing about the quality of their machines, nor the usefulness of their support.

Since purchasing a laptop for my wife from Dell (Order Date: 01/26/2009), we’ve had nothing but problems. I don’t use the machine much, so I haven’t really notice them, and with her only using the laptop from time to time, she’s just lived with the issues, growing ever more frustrated.

About a month ago, she came to me complaining that her screen was dark, and flashing. The next day, while she was at work, I opened it up, turned it on, and didn’t see anything wrong with it. I closed the machine, thinking that it was one of those errors that she’d never be able to replicate with me in the room. (I don’t know how that happens.) She was also complaining that when she was typing, the keyboard would do crazy things and that her mouse wouldn’t always move correctly. Having used a Dell before, I knew of the poor quality track pads they put in their machines, and constantly tried to tweak the settings for her, never getting it to work correctly.

The next day, while home, she complained of the issue again, and I looked and sure enough, the left hand side of the screen was noticeably darker than the right. It then also began to flicker wildly, going lighter and darker.

I called up Dell technical support, and talked to a nice representative about the issue, and he had me do a variety of software based tests, changes, and even remotely connected into the laptop. Of course, during the time I had him on the phone, the machine, which had been closed and powered off for some time, wouldn’t reproduce the issue, and I was casually dismissed.

When it happened again, I had my camera ready and switched it to video mode. Of course, even at 30fps, it couldn’t capture how bad it was, but I had video proof. How could they ignore me now? I contacted them, e-mailing the URL of the video. They complained they couldn’t open it, but were willing to send a box out to ship the laptop to them.

I did so, making sure to put the URL of the video on the issue sheet, in hope that the technician would have a better suited computer and be able to see the video. I also made mention of the various typing and mouse problems we were having, in hopes that they would fix those as well.

Sending off the laptop, they held onto it for a while, and then I got a call saying they couldn’t reproduce the issues I was having. I asked them if they saw the video, and of course, the technician had not. I told him that I had put the URL on the information sheet I sent in, to which he replied that he didn’t have that information.

I gave him the URL over the phone, and he said he would check into it. Today, I received a box that contains my wife’s laptop. Inside was a repair report. The report said that “after performing numerous functional tests, we have found no faults with your computer”.

Here is the video of the screen issue:

Every time I called, I was treated poorly, like I was trying to trick them, or lie to them. Sure, lots of problems are due to users making mistakes, but when I explain that I’ve built over a dozen desktops and have a degree in Computer Network and Tech Support, I think I can tell when the issue isn’t software related, and shouldn’t be told to update drivers when half the screen is flickering.

I think it is pretty plain to see what was wrong. It is most likely a loose connection between the base of the laptop and the screen, made worse due to the heat of the machine. Since receiving it only twenty minutes ago, I haven’t been able to replicate the screen issue, but the issues with the keyboard and touch pad still remain.

As I am typing, it will randomly act as though I’ve hit the CTRL key and when you hit Ctrl plus certain other keys like S, you’ll get a save dialog box, or make text italic. Sometimes, it will even highlight the current line of text, and so if you are typing at a fast pace, it will delete your writing. This is only made more frustrating because sometimes the mouse pointer won’t move, despite trying to move it to the edit and undo.

Most likely there is some kind of short with the keyboard, or issues with the build quality that are leading to these problems. In the end, my wife’s laptop acts like it is possessed, and therefore is a lemon. It isn’t even a year old, and I feel like an idiot for spending over a thousand dollars on a Dell.

Now, I’ll have to find a way to record the issues I am having with the keyboard and track pad, contact Dell again, and see what they say. Not that they even checked out my previous video, as the only video plays, according to Vimeo’s statistics, come from those I showed when I first took the video. Pretty sad when even video proof isn’t checked by support, technicians, or anyone at Dell.

With the way I am being treated, I doubt I will make that mistake again. Why can’t Dell give high quality service and support to non-business customers? If anyone reading this works at Dell, and would like to help set things right, my wife and I would really appreciate that. I want to continue to tell people they can trust Dell because they have products at a reasonable price, but if their support can’t handle the brand they are trying to build online, then they’ll still fall flat and be unable to compete over the long term.

Update as of August 14th, 2009

So a friend of mine in Dell has said he would help me get a “better” resolution to this issue, and I’ve been bugging him since then, but haven’t heard anything back. I am also going to attempt to contact the support department via the phone again soon to see if I can get a better fix for the issue. I thought things were going to be resolved, but it looks like the fight with Dell continues. Wish me luck…