Congratulations! You have achieved the amazing rank of Worst Customer Service Ever. I have a Dell computer that was recently 23 months, three weeks, and three days old. There were four days left on my warranty when I began to experience unbearable technical difficulties. Over the past three weeks I have had to call your technical “assistance” department 19 times. Yes, NINETEEN. It is really an interesting experience and I can highly recommend it to anybody who is in need of more stress in their life, or at the very least, a lively bout of elevated blood pressure. While I have never visited either country [and never will], I can now add India and the Philippines to the list of countries I have reached while trying to communicate with an American corporation.

I must say that it really is very thoughtful of you to teach the English language to all of your foreign employees. Every person I have spoken to has been fluent in English. Regrettably, they are not fluent in pronunciation and it has been nearly impossible to decipher the garble of their mechanical patter. I especially enjoy the “mm hmm” stall-tactic that has been incorporated into your business language. After all, I don’t need a specific “yes” or “no” answer when a non-committal “mm hmm” will suffice. I really do appreciate having to repeat myself 3-5 times for every sentence I utter. When I am done talking to you folks I can apply for a phone-sex job with the throaty purr that has replaced my normal speaking voice. At one point during this courting phase I decided for the pure frivolity of it to attempt to reach an American employee actually located in America! Oh, let the good times roll!!!! Two hours and eight phone calls later, I had, in fact, spoken to three different American-based Dell employees. I almost wept with joy at hearing a voice I could actually comprehend. Unfortunately, Dell takes their corporate “pass the buck” policy quite seriously and nobody was willing to actually provide me with any sort of viable help.

Thus far, I have learned that your “in-home warranty”, for which I paid a princely sum, does not actually mean “We will send a technician to your home to repair your computer”! Ha! you clever devils! You and your tricky wording! What the “warranty” actually means is: “We want you to call our overseas, unintelligible, American-job-stealing, evasive, unhelpful, foreign technical ‘assistance’ department. Multiple times. And then some. We want you to have the full experience of exciting conversations with exotic foreigners. Not that they’ll get anything accomplished, but hey, thanks to the internet the overseas phone calls are practically free for us! Really, we are just trying to expand your cultural horizons. Once you have reached the end of your personal courtesy resources and the word ‘patience’ has become entirely moot for all intents and purposes, then we would like you to place another volley of phone calls to our customer service department. After a few hours of voice-activated menu systems and a fresh supply of unhelpful and evasive foreigners, we are sure you will be only too grateful to be sent back to the technical ‘assistance’ folks. Seriously, Valued Customer, we do not actually *expect* you to jump backwards through flaming hoops of fire . . . but it gives us endless hours of entertainment!”

The many happy hours I have personally whiled away in chatting with your employees have, indeed, been highly educational. I have also learned that [1] I do not actually have the in-home warranty; [2] oh, wait, yes I do; [3] no, no really, I do not; [4] YES, YES I DO!; [5] just because I purchased specific additional software programmes does not mean that Dell will actually supply me with the CDs for that software, instead the software will be installed at the factory; [6] should it be necessary for ME to reformat my hard drive [??!!!], all of that extra software will be obliterated and it will be necessary for me to purchase it again at retail cost from somebody else; [7] while I am not a Dell employee nor a hardware technician, Dell will send me CDs in the mail which when inserted into my CD drive will cause my hard drive to implode; [8] Dell is not responsible for anything that happens while I follow the static-laden telephonic instructions of a badly-accented foreigner while connected via an unstable digital cable phone line to a third-world country; [9] despite being put on hold every few minutes while my wonderful cohort updates the case notes, nobody at Dell will read the case notes during the next call from me; [10] the case notes are usually incorrectly recorded and/or lost anyway; [11] despite my covering myself by requesting a case number to prove that I initiated this procedure *before* my warranty expired, Dell will take two weeks to mail the “repair” CDs to me and then they will still try to convince me that my warranty has expired; [12] nice try, but it did not work.

I believe the crowning moment, thus far, of this prolonged and painful experience was this morning when your representative asked me, and I quote: “Are you calling regarding a Dell computer?”

Now that I have finally browbeat you into agreeing to have somebody call me back sometime this week to set up a possible appointment to send an actual live human technician to my home, I can hardly wait to see what shows up on my doorstep.

In closing, I agree that I could have expressed myself a little more sedately when I suggested that some of your representatives die a slow and painful death. However, in my defense, I would like to state that when I was sketching that hanged man caricature, the large dot in the middle of its forehead was a bullet-hole and not anything racially-related.

Current Mood: peachy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Humour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.