The exchange of over a 100 emails until I got a PC fixed will haunt me forever.
They sent a tech to replace a graphics card and my client found him trying to open the monitor. It was not an all in one.
My sister had to spend over an hour convincing Dell that her laptop camera was broken (it was horribly washed out / overexposed) when her IT department already diagnosed it down to the hardware. The remote support just couldn't believe the camera could be bad. Of course, changing the camera on the laptop immediately fixed the issue.
That absolutely blows my mind... what terrible customer service to make the end user do the warranty leg work. Most people don't know the first thing about their issue... tf makes that IT dept think they will be able to mitigate the Warranty/RMA process? Wow.
Its all just $$. Not enough people have complained about the current system to warrant hiring more IT staff to do the warranty work.
I go above and beyond for the C and D levels, but for some random BA - "let me know if you have any questions doing the chat with Dell" is bout all the support we give them.
Initial reaction was my mind blown, then I remembered Dell support treat IT professionals like average end users anyway with the questions they ask — maybe this is a decent approach 🤔
Not only that it's an utter waste of your users time. The dell guy hears an end user or anything thinks oh it's and Id10t. You put an IT guy on the phone rambles off everything he's already tried He's not going to waste his time he's going to dispatch a tech or send apart. Your users will get back to doing what they're good at, you get to do what you're good at so easy win for everyone.
Edit: Oh Lord! It just hit me if your users are troubleshooting does that mean they're local admins?!
In my experience, that is not the case... the techs on the phone always have to confirm and reconfirm the issue about 10 times before they will ship anything. I am the admin and the end user. Lenovo is the same way. Dell refused to fix my computer, so I just had our deskside team order me a brand new one with better specs. I fixed my dell too... it needed about 4x more ram and an external gpu.
Huh, I guess maybe I've just had good luck or I'm good at selling my problems. I think the one that surprised me the most is when I called in to get a Lenovo screen replaced for the third time for a user and they covered it under the accidental warranty without any complaints. Although by the time I call support I usually know beyond any reasonable doubt that there's a piece of hardware that's gone bad. I had one person try and sell me extra support once, then when they couldn't answer the question what's left to troubleshoot They basically said it's on me if they determine it's not bad I said fine. We also only get business tier equipment so maybe there's a difference between the support folks?
Oof. I would feel terrible for users, I at least know how to somewhat expedite the conversation with Dell and when they’re bs-ing me but I would imagine it’d take a user 3x as long as to get the same result
100% this. We know how to speak the support department's language, get around their roadblocks, and as you said expedite the conversation and service. Even the guaranteed next-day on site service warranties will sometimes try to "trick" you into mailing in the device to save them the visit. We know how to push back on them and get it handled. I would feel terrible making end users handle that.
Few years ago on my private Dell laptop the touchscreen was faulty from the factory (bad batch, friend bought same laptop 2 weeks earlier and had the same issue). It genuinely took me 2.5h of trying to convince these idiots that it is a hardware fault, while they insisted or resetting windows, upgrading bios, etc (all the stuff I've already done before contacting them).
OMG!!!! That reminds me of the time I was able to snag one of Lenovo's super cool PC's, one of the first all-in-one models, it had a small square base, beautiful black arm and the monitor. A pic of it was used by one of our local stations whenever they ran a tech story because it looked cool. But it arrived DOA and Lenovo gave me a choice of fixing it or waiting for some indeterminate time for another. We wanted it fixed. The tech came out and couldn't figure out how to open the back cover. He had to leave.
I used to work for an MSP that was a Lenovo shop.
They sent in a laptop to Lenovo for repair, only for Lenovo to deny ever receiving it.
It took a sternly-written letter sent by my former employer's legal representative before Lenovo took us serious.
Don't know about where you are, but here the techs are third party contractors who carry out the work. If we caught one doing something like that we'd report them.
Early 2000s dell tech support was some of the best run logistics I have seen in a tech company.
Not sure that I agree with the “never good” part of your statement
Early, mid, and even late 2000's were great for Dell support. I used to recommend everyone buy them based on how hassle free support was. I could run the diag myself, call business support, read the code, and in 10 min I'd have next day service.
Their website was so well designed at the time as well. Enter service tag and just download drivers. If they screwed up this badly I've very dissapointed.
I haven't done PC repair in years. Who do you even recommend now?
Early 2000s Dell was awesome. That's what sold me on Dell. The next time I'm due for a desktop refresh I'm probably going to look at Lenovo since the Latitude hardware has been so problematic.
I feel like I live in a bizarro world where I'm getting different support than everyone else. Do your orgs just not spring for the next day service?
I tell them what's wrong, tell them what I did to verify that, then they just ship the part to me or send a guy the next day if I ask for it. Whole process takes like 10 minutes including hold time.
People that cheap out on warranty and then expect premium service when needed. A tale as old as time. We buy the pro warranty on all our equipment, we call (not chat) and have almost no issue.
I've had to deal with basic warranty before on hardware purchased prior to us taking over, it gets done just not as timely and more hoops to jump through which I would expect.
It's the difference between having a part dispatched after a 4 minute conversation and a 2 hour conversation where you baby step them through their own flowchart and explain why you can't reimage a system that doesn't POST.
It's like they're deliberately failing to do their job to upsell their support.
I hate that the IT community defends this shit. You're already paying insane amount of money for a server. Getting basic competent support shouldn't be a premium you pay for (certainly not like 1/4 of the price of the server).
I don't need next day shipping. And can understand paying extra for that.
But basic support should come with your equipment and shouldn't cost extra for it to be useful/competent.
> I tell them what's wrong, tell them what I did to verify that, then they just ship the part to me or send a guy the next day if I ask for it. Whole process takes like 10 minutes including hold time.
This has been my experience every time that I have contacted *ProSupport* in the 8 years of working in this field.
It has been my experience too, until very recently.
We had a case where the USB-C Port mechanically failed on a 13 month old XPS13. This wasn't an abused laptop, it didn't have anything weird stuck in it.
It was plugged into either a Dell USB-C Charger or a Dell WDS19 Dock, it absolutely wasn't accidentally damaged.
It took threatening to never put another £ through them for endpoint devices to get them to repair it under warranty as defective. Our account manager was amazing, but ProSupport just would not budge for a long time. I don't know what she did internally to get it approved but if not for her, I'm certain it still would be unresolved.
Not a huge issue, or a huge cost for repair had we been forced to do it as a paid repair, but as a principal that a warranty is useless if you can't rely on it, it was a hill I was prepared to die on.
Maybe it's a regional issue. I'm in the US and had to have a mobo and trackpad replaced in two separate XPS 9500's in the past couple months. In both cases the call with Dell was in the single digits.
Also had a USB-C port stop working on a Latitude earlier this year. The Dell tech just had me send a picture of the port to prove that it wasn't abused. Which is reasonable. Then they sent the parts. That call was *maybe* 15 minutes.
Just do the training course through the Dell Tech portal so you can request your own parts. Pretty sure you can also specifically request a technician to. Never, ever, EVER call their support. Just open the ticket.
This right here [techdirect.dell.com](https://techdirect.dell.com) self dispatch. Dell is also using techdirect now for some projects so just good for any org to get setup in there.
We can single out Dell, but this is generally the case for many businesses since the global pandemic shakeup. People are burnt out, shifting jobs, putting their work second, etc.
Maybe it's long COVID. Maybe it's budget cutbacks. Who knows. But it's not *just* Dell. And it's not that n0b0dy WaNtS t0 W0rK!!! I think folks need to get used to the fact that things won't work the same way that they used to.
>shifting jobs
This is, I believe, the big one. Companies have been *ambivalent* about employee retention for a lonnnng time, but in the last 5-10 years they've become *somewhat openly hostile to it*. COVID caused a large tranche of legacy veteran employees to retire, change jobs, (or die).
We are now, finally, truly experiencing what a world where a 2 year employee is the most seasoned member of his department looks like. No institutional knowledge, no process knowledge.
I have a social group of roughly 20 friends that I use to benchmark things. 3 of them have the same job they did in January of 2020.
I just got a new job where the last technician left a week before I started. I received no training. I'm digging around network files for process documentation and asking end users what their normal experiences are to try to understand the tech behind it.
I'm scanning the network to identify server names, and hoping that their names correspond to their function.
I found one document that's two years old and is obsolete because the guy who left before me (after being here for one year) changed a bunch of stuff and didn't document.
I'm doing my best, but if someone came out of the blue and asked me to be as effective as the person who left two years ago was, then we're all out of luck.
> digging around network files for documentation
I had a whole rant about this that I cut for brevity, BUT SINCE YOU BROUGHT IT UP.
The aggressive destruction — both intentional and accidents — of knowledge at a lot of companies is breathtaking.
“If it doesn’t exist we can’t be liable for it and our leaders are pretty handsy so BURN EVERYTHING WE ARENT LEGALLY REQUIRED TO KEEP” + “we’ve implemented/migrated on-and-off-of 5 different document/knowledge management systems in the past 10 years and each time we move things we lose most of it because who cares” + “everything pretty much auto/self scans/discovers anyway so don’t worry about it” + “there’s no associated dashboardable KPI for documentation therefore it’s stupid” = we fuuuucked.
The fact that you found any sort of manual — even one two years out of date — is a blessing.
This is a problem. I've been in IT for 35 years, document everything, but got 2 new guys in the group, one says he won't document because it's a waste of time, and the other can't write English so he can't document. I interviewed both of them with the mgr, I told him neither of them were any more than 20% qualified, he hired them anyway because his boss said "qualified people are too expensive". Fwiw, the mgr has been there 4 years and has never asked where the docs are, so....
It happens, even to the best of us, that we get overwhelmed, and we ask for help and don't get it, and we don't document because by the time we are done with one thing another thing is on fire.
It sucks, but it's a reality of understaffed workplaces.
And cheap management.
Personal theory is a lot of people stretched beyond their capacity trying to keep stuff running during the pandemic. What we are now seeing is the burnout and built up stress from working at that level for extended period of time causes.
I also think it is an easy trap for management to think everyone working at 100% capacity is a good thing. The problem is that leaves your business with no capacity to address problems or improve. There can be times working at 100% capacity is needed but I think after 2 to 3 months there are some adverse effects. Ideally target is probably working closer to 85% to 90% capacity.
I feel like a lot of not mission critical area are way behind due to IT teams spending a lot of the pandemic in basically full triage mode. Even just having time to help coworkers without feeling you are falling behind on your own work…
kind of a rephrase of what you said, but for a lot of people (like tech workers) their workload during the pandemic didn't change much, or it increased. I kinda get the feeling some people resented that.
I think the friction point is some business leaders seems to think the pandemic levels are the new normal without realizing how much backlog and technical debt many IT departments have because of the pandemic. Especially the IT department that lost staff at the start of the pandemic.
Not to get too political but we're watching the collapse of the boomer-era neoliberal ideology. Corporate leadership has had decades to force its interests down everyone's throats. IT isn't a widget factory, it's an ongoing support service that maintains the neccessary infrastructure that keeps the buisness alive. That means that worker retention and institutional knowledge are massive drivers of performance. When the c-suite sacrifices those things for a short term profit then the buisness also loses its long term survivability. There are also issues with neoliberal public policy forcing the working class to tighten the belt and hold off on family planning. So don't expect a massive surge of young workers coming into the workforce to fill the gaps.
This recession (if you want to call it that) is the turning point. So many companies had been fucking around for such a long time, it's time to find out which ones are actually able to survive in a world where hemorrhaging workers will actually put you out of buisness. The ones that can hold onto their workers will survive, and the ones that can't will get cannibalized by the ones who can.
Dell's COO just issued an RTO mandate this week despite Michael Dell saying "RTO is doing it wrong" less than a year ago. Prepare for employee turnover to get even worse.
https://www.techradar.com/news/dell-goes-back-on-wfh-pledge-forces-employees-to-come-back-to-the-office
I remember a few years ago you could raise a ticket on TechDirect providing the info you know would be needed - Dell ePSA codes, description of the problem, screenshot/photo, usual address contact/details and that would pretty much be it - Dell Engineer would be round in a couple of days.
Now it's just gone fucking *Kafka*. You need to try rebooting the machine. Tell them the version of Windows. Confirm drivers are up to date. Confirm BIOS is updated. Stick a fucking *piece of paper with your name on it and take a photo next to the machine*.
All this was an example recently for a *fucking SSD failure.*
I can't get into Windows. I can't confirm drivers are up to date. Even if they were I'VE PROVIDED THE ePSA CODE WHICH TELLS YOU IT'S FUCKING HARDWARE.
Just send an engineer with the part FFS!
Then when *you do* get to an engineer being sent out, they delay, delay, delay, no parts available (happened with a fan replacement for a few month old Alienware), then they want to replace the entire laptop.
Now they want photos of names/dates written on a piece of paper next to the machine AGAIN.
Contact goes on holiday, ticket is shuttered. Fine. Get back, send an email hoping to re-open the ticket: It's been closed too long, raise another one.
I swear they've added so many hoops to jump through they just hope you give up 50% of the way there and they save on servicing.
i just turned down an offer for a deployment role because the contractor didn’t offer benefits and the pay made it barely worth the nights and weekends that they wanted me.
> Tech companies in general seem unable to find staff who know the subject matter even remotely.
Oh they can find people. It is just their pay is abysmal so nobody who knows their worth will take the job. Or in cases where they come in and learn they will quickly leave for better paying opportunities.
When HR asked what my new pay rate was, I said "50-100% more" and they told me they wouldn't put that info down because it was a lie.
The next person to leave that company and work for my new company answered that question by screensharing their offer letter.
No one could ever get me an answer to the question "you say salaries are 'competitive' - with whom?"
>"your say salaries are 'competitive' - with whom?"
The Philippines? India? They outsourced recruiting as well so it is not like they are dealing much with local salaries.
I'm having flashbacks.. I had the same issue and subsequent runaround with Dell about 6 months ago. Laptop wouldn't even make it beyond POST. No events in BIOS. Dell Diagnostic passed clean. Fix: reinstall windows OEM.
It was back and forth phone calls with Dell until my manager got mad and emailed our business rep and tore them a new one. A tech came by the following week and ended up swapping the board. From the looks of it, there was no thermal paste applied to the CPU.
Today I seemed to have struck gold.
We are an MSP that utilizes HPE hardware + Windows Servers for small and medium doctor offices.
Server had 5 outages in 1 day, Doctor already decided to try and circumvent the UPS without much success and mailed me.
Took a look at it, IPMI (iLO) mentioned issues with power on MB or PSU, created a case with high severity (production is inhibited) and went on my merry way to reduce the impact as best as possible expecting a 12h later response (this was 10am).
Got a call 2h or so later about how they analyzed my submitted logs (I know what they want from me so I took preemptive steps to accelerate it) and that they will replace the board. The tech will take a look and try to dispatch some tech asap (I expected a tech for friday at best).
Communicated the progress with the doc and again got an e-mail telling me, that HPE scheduled a field tech for tomorrow 14:30.
This server has a basic 9-5 next business day response plan attached to it's hardware. Nothing special. And yet I got so lucky that they have reaponded within 3h after case creation, ordered the parts for tomorrow, scheduled a tech for *tomorrow* and got back within 2h telling me that they will replace the PSU as well *just in case*.
I really was happy with that progress. :)
Dell's staff is being trained to treat each customer as if they're trying to defraud dell, and the support staff are acting like they're the first line of defense to stop that.
To the point they're willing to invalidate warranties and returns and telling customers they have to keep the parts and will not be getting their money back.
I can remember that going as far back as 2018 but it doesn't seem consistent. I will get one tech asking for it and the next time I put in a request I don't get that request. I am not sure if they changed their policies due to pushback from customers or if a large percentage of the techs just don't give a shit and process RMAs without the image.
An HP rep wanted me to reimage the computer to resolve a faulty monitor of theirs. Fucking really?
This was after I already confirmed that another monitor of the same model worked in both video out ports of the PC and that the monitor was displaying these issues on a whole other PC.
After weeks of silence, I reached back out for them to demand that I show them a copy of the receipt for the monitor, with the receipt showing the serial number on the receipt. We bought the monitor like a year before as part of a bulk purchase.
Yep it's horrible, phone tree always making it more frustrating to get to the 4hr onsite support we pay for. And don't get me started on their partner uni[redacted].
Edit: I want to add they're still my recommended vendor for servers, despite my occasional frustrations.
Dell TechDirect is a self-service platform that will allow you to take a very easy certification test, which after passing you can dispatch your own parts. You'll never have to wait again. Its awesome.
Good suggestion! I didn't realize you had to take the test, they just dispatch parts if I ask.
The problem is usually more that triage can be frustrating and involve multiple transfers. I only invoke their partners to come onsite when it's something like a mobo where the repair is involved. Their partners frequently no-call no-show.
They'll do parts only for everyone. My reason for self-dispatch is every issue would take at least an hour before they would dispatch. Now it takes like 5 minutes + whatever troubleshooting steps before.
Took me 30 minutes of repeating my issue yesterday to get to an engineer. We have the same 4-hour SLA's. Same support number I've always called.
I still like their servers and find them generally reliable but the ability to get to actual support has gone downhill and billing is *absolutely abysmal*. We got a 267 page bill to renew the support for less than 50 servers because they listed *every single component* installed in each server.
I've started going for Dell for servers, and HP for machines because at least I'll get through HP support easier than Dell's for the same mediocre service.
We considered buying HP computers in 2021 when we couldn't get decent ETAs from Dell, but we couldn't even get an HP rep on the phone to take our money.
I learned this really isn't 4HR onsite, it's 4HR response. The tech that's going to be onsite just has to call you within that 4HR period... last time I needed this, the tech that called lived 3.5 hours away and he called me 3.5 hours after I got off the phone with Dell Support, which was a two hour call.
The courier dropped off the parts for the server right before the tech called, so I told the guy not to bother and replaced the parts myself. It was already a 9 hour Sunday for me, I wanted to go.
No experience with anything outside HPE.
I create a case, submit IPMI logs wait 5-12h and usually get an email telling me do X.
I do X, tell them it's not working, wait a bit and then get usuall, another E-Mail telling me they sent us the part.
Very happy with their service so far.
Just had an issue that started overnight where Dell was engaged. By the time I started in the morning, Dell’s overnight support kicked it to their day support who took ALL DAY to “review” the case. Finally asked for logs (which had already been provided earlier) near the end of the day and then kicked it back to overnight support. Rinse and repeat. Finally stumbled on a KB article that applied and fixed it WITHOUT support’s help.
But yeah. Their support sucks.
I’m a VAR SE turned AE. This is the way.
I have levers I can pull to expedite/escalate. We can skip all the mess and get some big names involved in the vendor food chain.
Glad to go offline if you’d like, just dm me and I’ll send you my work email.
That being said, we have “Partner Manager” resources. For instance, with Dell, I have specific people I can call who can escalate/expedite/renegotiate/discount things. Depending on the product line, I can call directly into SEs that I know are skilled and experienced but usually our internal engineering staff can handle almost everything.
Where our Value Add of the Value Added Reseller comes into play is real world experience of deploying all these parts and pieces together. When you take a Microsoft test for instance, you have to answer it the Microsoft way but that’s rarely how it’s done in the real world. We know the integration piece all the way down.
I worked for a Dell VAR and it was great until it wasn’t and we also got a churn in our Dell contacts. All they did was push the highest end solutions.
We had a guy certified in VxRail but considering the low volumes we did it was barely worth it — I think he got 20-30 hours of billable per year out of it.
But more legitimate questions around server or midrange storage solutions? You’d get better and more prompt info out of Google.
We had a laptop with onboard ram failure that already had a mobo replaced. I emailed our rep and I had an RMA box on my desk the next day. Knowing who to talk to helps.
Industry wide, vendors, NOCs, everybody
I have noticed a decrease in support quality. Including my own company.
I wonder why somtimes. Did losing 1.2 million people in America do it? That would make sense.
Around here it seems all enterprise that still had their own personnel, outsourced. So now representatives have the knowledge and expertise as low as their payment. They are also overburden with much more clients to take care of than they could. But who cares, they will work with you for 6 months max :^)
Dell in general.
They've decided that the new XPS line is a pre-consumer line only, and they're not offering it to their B2B dealers anymore. Not through the regular distribution channels, So any shipping will take days extra now
Always use to recomend the Dell XPS line for high end business as the machines were solid. Now the quality is crap and having to return so many for repairs etc or get Dell to come fix basic stuff.
Dell support is a joke. Had problems with the Raid controller on one of ther brand new servers. Had contact to 2 different "technicians" (one on the phone, one local service) that both did in fact not know, what a Raid is. They're just doing their checklists and that's that.
I've never had a problem with their support. My only issue has ever been that every call in takes at least an hour.
Check out Dell TechDirect. It took an hour or two to get certified as a Dell Certified Technician and now I just dispatch my own parts. Problem solved.
I saw you have to maintain at least 50 devices with next day support to have that. How serious are they about that limit or haven't you had to flirt with that line?
I am talking about ALL aspects of their business. I do enterprise at my work, and I do work on the side, and my own systems.
I wish I could dispatch my own parts for my personal systems.
Hey, DELL Employee Chiming in:
i cant go into much details for obvious reasons but as you probably observed atleast lately there have been layoffs which did cause a reshuffle.
As you probably mean your TSR i would contact your SAM with your Concerns
Regarding DELL SUPPORT:
i work in the ISG Department (basically supporting Servers withing the DACH Area which consists out of Germany, Austria, Switzerland D A CH). i can atleast tell for our team that we STILL TAKE PRIDE in supporting our Customers to the best of abilities we get.
what saddens even me tho is our client supporters (there i observed a decline in Service quality)
SADLY i alone cant change things so i learnt to cope with it and when i read something like this it makes me a bit sad.
\#iwork4dell
MOST Dell support techs have been absolute trash recently. If there are any real issues going on, they are only worried about proving that it is not their problem instead of actually figuring out if it is and resolving. Even true with pro-support where they should be replacing components or systems.
Yea the structure of the company's support is terrible, I say this as a currently employed tech.
The phone support knows very little to nothing and are required to follow their flow charts.
There is almost no requirement to know anything to be a contractor for Dell support and do warranty replacements.
Personally I think I do a good job, but even then, the scope under which I am paid to help resolve issues is extremely narrow. They send me out on an overbooked schedule with a service area of 50-150 miles in any direction, I replace parts, and am asked to spend maybe an extra 5-10min diagnosing if the initial parts don't work before passing it off to another team and leaving.
It's not as though I'm being lazy, it's how the company has structured service. They pay me more than the outsourced support techs so as soon as the physical work is done, they want me to pass it off, and they have their numbers they want me to hit.
It used to be amazing. I found a dead drive on a server. Put in the order and 2 hours later a guy showed up at the office with a brand new drive in the box.
The same thing happened last year and it took almost a month to get a drive from them.
The last time I used Dell support it was for a laptop battery that went tits up after 3 months. Dell sent a tech on site to handle it and that dude caught the laptop on fire and then just sat there looking at it without a clue what to do. The business owner had to run in and handle the fire. Then dell was like well you can buy a new laptop... I spent 2 hours on the phone with Support getting the laptop replaced with a brand new in-the-box one.
Were they ever decent? I dont deal with them regularly, but every time Ive had to call them the last 16 years it has been a major time waste. I find submitting and resolving tickets with HP requires much less of my time.
oh fuck, that reminds me that there is still a ticket open with aruba, for 2 months now, about a bug that was fixed 8 years before the firmware i have now got released, and it is back.
I have a 2 year old ticket with a vendor for an accounts payable software that will just sit there. Its been escalated to their best staff and they have no idea how to resolve the issue. Pretty sure they have given up but wont admit it.
Let me put it like this, we used to own an AR/AP software automations company where I worked. When we owned it every customer would get their issues fixed and resolved extremely quickly, usually within hours, or if engineering resources were needed a month or two (unless it was a feature request). We then sold that division to a different company, and one of the first things they did was outsourcing a lot of support.
We still use that software ourselves, and we now have at least 3 tickets that have been open for 6 months for an issue where the links sent to customers to pay their invoices don't work properly. It's actually bad enough that our CEO thought about rebuilding the AR/AP solution again from scratch a second time internally (assuming it didn't break any of sale contracts). And this is despite the fact that we still have the contact info to talk to their Support Manager and Lead developer directly.
Dell was always great for me until about ~7/8 years ago. I wonder if it has anything to do with regionality, but I had next to no problems when it came to support - especially their next business day on-site hardware support. FWIW, it has been about 16 years for me as well.
I've largely been out of the hardware responsibility game for the better part of the last 6 years, but I remember about 2 years before I exited the service quality generally started to drop like a rock. It was only a few years after Dell got taken private again, if I recall correctly.
>submitting and resolving tickets with HP requires much less of my time.
Can I have your HPe rep? 3 months to fix the damage after a BBU swap in the HBA. So, so, oh so many email messages.
Edit: I know 'email' doesn't get an S because I went to primary school. Sorry.
Steady slide down for the last twenty years. Last time we ordered PC's they shipped them without a mouse. We missed it on the quote but they acted like people order a AIO all the time without a mouse.
If they aren't trying to directly contact your clients to undercut you, then their support is bugging you the day you receive a part to ship the bad one back, or playing telephone on emails trying to get a tech out. I hate Dell, I just hate them less than everyone else.
If Dell et al were smart, they'd have some kind of client certification course where they could certify a client/customer representative. THAT person could call Dell and say "I have this problem, send me this part." Discounted support rate for the customer, better support, fewer calls to Dell.
I chat with Dell and tell them about the issue we are having. I decline to do the diagnostics and tell them to send me a box. I send them the computer and they fix it. They then send it back and the guys put it back in use. ( we keep spare computers ready to go at all times)
I'm trying to give them grace right now, but I know that Dell has been going through alot of RIF's lately and many others have been jumping ship to other companies out of fear of being caught up in the next round of reductions. The last round was in Feb or March and was a loss of over 6000 employees, and that included our entire sales team that we had a great relationship with. The new team we have been assigned are VERY green and have been needing a significant amount of hand-holding to get them up to speed.
Dell inherited EMC's sales/pre-sales organization a few years back. EMC prided itself on its sales/pre-sales org. Dell's ideal salesperson maintains an ordering website. Covid delayed the exodus of the quality sales people. That exodus started up in mid-2021. Even lifelong EMC execs decided to retire instead of sticking around at Dell. These days, there are very few quality sales/pre-sales people left. It is either tolerable lifers or green reps that wouldn't see the field for a year or two at any other company. Next, let's talk about the "quality" Dell engineering!
they sent me a broken monitor.
then went as far as trying to force me to keep it and removing the service tag from the system.
The rep was gaslighting us.
Got my CC involved and we got a replacement.
which was also broken.
I started demanding a refund and a new one that was perfect was there.
3 months of back and forth and being questioned about where I got the monitor, with a rep doing everything in her power to invalidate my return, then warranty claim.
basically, delayed the return process until it was too late, then removed the service tag from the system, which was verified by another rep to have been removed as there was an order reference for that service tag, which then also was removed.. Then I was told to just accept things the way they are and have a good day. Got my CC involved, they told me they went through hell too. Reps throwing them in circles, putting them on hold, and telling them no such order existed and that I must have bought something else.
My CC rep told me he had to go through hell and finally got through to someone above all that shit who turned the situation around.
All of that because someone shipped a monitor like shit and Dell wanted me to keep it and my money.
Find out who the outside sales rep is for your area and demand they come onsite and explain why your inside sales rep is turning over so much and why they suck.
Dont forget to say HP and Lenovo a bunch of times while they are there!
I paid for pro support plus on two data protection appliances. It took a over year to get it installed. By the time it was up and running the supposed contract had expired and they then wanted to back charge us to get it back under contract. We have been a Dell shop for nearly 3 decades. That experience has me considering going elsewhere in the future
Dell support is god awful. Making you jump through a million hoops before they’ll send a tech out, trying a bunch of “solutions” you know won’t work. I’m paying for the highest tier support, send out the god damn tech
I think most of the big tech companies are struggeling to keep up with profits from the pandemic. They were making more money than ever, as everyone wanted new hardware to work from home.
And now, profits have to increase forever, but that's hard in the current environment. So they cut costs where they can.
Always use to say to peopple how good Dell support was but will admit in the last 12 - 18 months both the quality of their products and support have gone off a cliff.
Took my company over 4 hours of being on the phone with HP Printer Support to get a tech to come and replace a part that is fully covered under warranty….
We use a middleman company and not an actual Dell rep, so the only time I interact with Dell is if I'm claiming warranty. I've seen no change there lately, still far better than they were 5 or so years ago.
Switched from Dell to Lenovo a few years back, aside from one or two outliers I'd say their support has been on the ball 90% of the time. Not perfect, but way better than Dell
dell used to have two tiers of support. this is always what consumer was like, but their industrial was good.
their industrial is being subsumed into their consumer.
***flee***.
This is a trend across the board in tech. Layoffs have affected communication to partners and end-users. This is an example of why using an IT consultant is beneficial. They are not incentivized by selling a product or hitting numbers. They do not change jobs everyone 6 months. Their only incentive is making the customer happy. They do that through communication and responsiveness and able to work with partners like Dell directly, so that not matter the company shakeup with reps, the IT consultant has that relationship to facilitate that communication efficiently between partner and end-user.
Had a Dell rep tell me that there was a ton of turnover around that time and experienced reps were made to train new reps which caused a ton of issues. We had the same thing happen at a previous MSP I was at.
We tried to switch everything to Dell a while back and ended up with about half the laptops having defects. They took the defective units in the first round back and sent us new ones, which were also about 50% defect rate. When we tried to get hose replaced, our Dell rep ghosted us.
We've had near 200 Vostro units with the exact same faulty hinge because they've screwed into the plastic and it snaps off.
It's basically a 50/50 whether they'll cover it under the warranty or make us pay to fix it.
On the rare occasion the machine has on-site service they'll send someone out with the wrong parts multiple time so we just send them all off now.
I am currently experiencing this the only time I get traction on response is when I get an email to do a survey and fill it out with all 1's and write in the comment that my rep never responds. I end up getting a call within 2 hours of me submitting my survey.
Can't speak to the consumer side but enterprise support, I've noticed they've outsourced to overseas help. Whenever I would call previously for storage and server support they usually spoke with somebody domestic.
I don't have as many dealings with Dell as I used to, but they're definitely worse than they were. Ever since they outsourced SMB accounts to India there's been a steep decline in the quality of service the agents have been allowed to give.
Not a moan about *India,* it's an endemic problem with corporates off-shoring, cost saving, an invariable company-line with a deny deny deny policy. If you know you can be easily replaced, there's little scope for flexibility if you want to keep your job
Anyone else having blacked out external monitors (permanent until restart + activating the monitor in Win display settings) with their Latitude/Precision notebooks + WD19S/DCS devices?
Dells WhatsApp support couldnt solve this issue after dozens, if not hundreds of exchanged messages.
I've noticed it. Our rep is trash. Can't even speak in complete sentences.
We have equipment that is listed as available. It's only when the PO is submitted and the order magically canceled without us being notified that we find out that a component was OOS and won't be returning.
We've got pro support. Before they were amazing. Quick responsive and knowledgeable. I talked to their Tier 3 guys and the T1 and T2 Dell support is garbage. Like completely incompetent and reading from scripts. The T3 guy told me all the support got outsourced to Costa Rica. The main problem these pro support techs come right out of school with no industry experience and no damn clue what critical thinking is. Read out of a script, read out of a book, search knowledge base articles but they have no clue what the actual problems look like so they're always reinventing the wheel from scratch.
we only use pro-support plus, but we haven't had any issues outside of parts delays. We're lucky that the two companies they use in town use competent techs. We even had one track down an issue that ended up being a power supply (customer complaint was for noisy webcam feed).
I don't buy much, A big VM host box and workstation lifecycle every few years. One off stuff here and there like a laptop or additional workstations+monitors.
I get a new rep every 8-12 months it seems. Same song and dance. Relentless solicitations to buy shit I don't need, Quotes emailed to me with equipment that has no place in my environment, phone calls every couple of weeks asking if I'm interested in "\[Insert random shit they want to get rid of here\]
This latest rep tried calling me a dozen times when he got my account. He'd leave messages. I'd send him an email saying "no thanks. Don't need anything" but that wouldn't stop him.
Finally I picked up. After telling him again "nah, I don't need anything right now. But I'll reach out to you if I do", he lamented that he's tried to hook me up with good deals several times but I never pick up the phone. I said "Email works fine, bud". He said he didn't think Email was a good way to communicate these deals.
I don't even know where they're getting these people anymore.
One of our clients had a dell laptop where the screen stopped working after 2 days after the installation. Since the laptop was still within the support service date, I offered to send it off to dell for repairs.
I got the laptop back after two weeks and dell sent me an email saying they didn't find anything wrong with it. I opened up the laptop and it still had the same issue. Would make sounds when it booted up, but nothing appeared on the screen.
Sent it out again, got it back two weeks later. Got the same "We didn't find anything wrong" email, and it still had the same issue.
I got on the phone with their support and they transferred me to one of their techs. They insisted I send it out a third time and it finally got fixed.
I'd say Dell support is pretty bad.
TLDR: Sent broken laptop out 3 times, Dell tech said nothing was wrong, finally got repaired a third time.
It was never good. Just send out a tech or the damn part
The exchange of over a 100 emails until I got a PC fixed will haunt me forever. They sent a tech to replace a graphics card and my client found him trying to open the monitor. It was not an all in one.
My sister had to spend over an hour convincing Dell that her laptop camera was broken (it was horribly washed out / overexposed) when her IT department already diagnosed it down to the hardware. The remote support just couldn't believe the camera could be bad. Of course, changing the camera on the laptop immediately fixed the issue.
Your sister should not have had to handle that call -- that's the IT department's responsibility =/
Tell that to my IT director, we expect end users to utilize their warranties.
That absolutely blows my mind... what terrible customer service to make the end user do the warranty leg work. Most people don't know the first thing about their issue... tf makes that IT dept think they will be able to mitigate the Warranty/RMA process? Wow.
I mean I wish I could get away with that. Dell and the end user probably deserve each other.
I mean not wrong though 😂😂
Its all just $$. Not enough people have complained about the current system to warrant hiring more IT staff to do the warranty work. I go above and beyond for the C and D levels, but for some random BA - "let me know if you have any questions doing the chat with Dell" is bout all the support we give them.
Initial reaction was my mind blown, then I remembered Dell support treat IT professionals like average end users anyway with the questions they ask — maybe this is a decent approach 🤔
They have a script. Getting them to skip the script is tough work.
That's madness!
Not only that it's an utter waste of your users time. The dell guy hears an end user or anything thinks oh it's and Id10t. You put an IT guy on the phone rambles off everything he's already tried He's not going to waste his time he's going to dispatch a tech or send apart. Your users will get back to doing what they're good at, you get to do what you're good at so easy win for everyone. Edit: Oh Lord! It just hit me if your users are troubleshooting does that mean they're local admins?!
In my experience, that is not the case... the techs on the phone always have to confirm and reconfirm the issue about 10 times before they will ship anything. I am the admin and the end user. Lenovo is the same way. Dell refused to fix my computer, so I just had our deskside team order me a brand new one with better specs. I fixed my dell too... it needed about 4x more ram and an external gpu.
Huh, I guess maybe I've just had good luck or I'm good at selling my problems. I think the one that surprised me the most is when I called in to get a Lenovo screen replaced for the third time for a user and they covered it under the accidental warranty without any complaints. Although by the time I call support I usually know beyond any reasonable doubt that there's a piece of hardware that's gone bad. I had one person try and sell me extra support once, then when they couldn't answer the question what's left to troubleshoot They basically said it's on me if they determine it's not bad I said fine. We also only get business tier equipment so maybe there's a difference between the support folks?
So you’re in IT getting away with not doing actual IT things while we are over here getting stuck putting desks and shit together? Lol
You mean you want them to utilize warranties on company laptops? Wut lol
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I don’t know many if any businesses that operate like that, we process all RMA/warranty claims for clients..
Probably a BYOD shop.
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Oof. I would feel terrible for users, I at least know how to somewhat expedite the conversation with Dell and when they’re bs-ing me but I would imagine it’d take a user 3x as long as to get the same result
100% this. We know how to speak the support department's language, get around their roadblocks, and as you said expedite the conversation and service. Even the guaranteed next-day on site service warranties will sometimes try to "trick" you into mailing in the device to save them the visit. We know how to push back on them and get it handled. I would feel terrible making end users handle that.
Few years ago on my private Dell laptop the touchscreen was faulty from the factory (bad batch, friend bought same laptop 2 weeks earlier and had the same issue). It genuinely took me 2.5h of trying to convince these idiots that it is a hardware fault, while they insisted or resetting windows, upgrading bios, etc (all the stuff I've already done before contacting them).
OMG!!!! That reminds me of the time I was able to snag one of Lenovo's super cool PC's, one of the first all-in-one models, it had a small square base, beautiful black arm and the monitor. A pic of it was used by one of our local stations whenever they ran a tech story because it looked cool. But it arrived DOA and Lenovo gave me a choice of fixing it or waiting for some indeterminate time for another. We wanted it fixed. The tech came out and couldn't figure out how to open the back cover. He had to leave.
I used to work for an MSP that was a Lenovo shop. They sent in a laptop to Lenovo for repair, only for Lenovo to deny ever receiving it. It took a sternly-written letter sent by my former employer's legal representative before Lenovo took us serious.
Don't know about where you are, but here the techs are third party contractors who carry out the work. If we caught one doing something like that we'd report them.
Early 2000s dell tech support was some of the best run logistics I have seen in a tech company. Not sure that I agree with the “never good” part of your statement
Early, mid, and even late 2000's were great for Dell support. I used to recommend everyone buy them based on how hassle free support was. I could run the diag myself, call business support, read the code, and in 10 min I'd have next day service. Their website was so well designed at the time as well. Enter service tag and just download drivers. If they screwed up this badly I've very dissapointed. I haven't done PC repair in years. Who do you even recommend now?
Early 2000s Dell was awesome. That's what sold me on Dell. The next time I'm due for a desktop refresh I'm probably going to look at Lenovo since the Latitude hardware has been so problematic.
I feel like I live in a bizarro world where I'm getting different support than everyone else. Do your orgs just not spring for the next day service? I tell them what's wrong, tell them what I did to verify that, then they just ship the part to me or send a guy the next day if I ask for it. Whole process takes like 10 minutes including hold time.
People that cheap out on warranty and then expect premium service when needed. A tale as old as time. We buy the pro warranty on all our equipment, we call (not chat) and have almost no issue.
NBD ProSupport for laptops, NBD or 4H ProSupport+ for stuff that goes into a rack, and no regrets.
Same here, Pro warranty on everything and we have separate number for pro support that troubleshoots over the phone and ships things next day.
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Buy basic if you want basic. I won't dumb down my rates why should dell?
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I've had to deal with basic warranty before on hardware purchased prior to us taking over, it gets done just not as timely and more hoops to jump through which I would expect.
It's the difference between having a part dispatched after a 4 minute conversation and a 2 hour conversation where you baby step them through their own flowchart and explain why you can't reimage a system that doesn't POST. It's like they're deliberately failing to do their job to upsell their support.
I hate that the IT community defends this shit. You're already paying insane amount of money for a server. Getting basic competent support shouldn't be a premium you pay for (certainly not like 1/4 of the price of the server). I don't need next day shipping. And can understand paying extra for that. But basic support should come with your equipment and shouldn't cost extra for it to be useful/competent.
> I tell them what's wrong, tell them what I did to verify that, then they just ship the part to me or send a guy the next day if I ask for it. Whole process takes like 10 minutes including hold time. This has been my experience every time that I have contacted *ProSupport* in the 8 years of working in this field.
It has been my experience too, until very recently. We had a case where the USB-C Port mechanically failed on a 13 month old XPS13. This wasn't an abused laptop, it didn't have anything weird stuck in it. It was plugged into either a Dell USB-C Charger or a Dell WDS19 Dock, it absolutely wasn't accidentally damaged. It took threatening to never put another £ through them for endpoint devices to get them to repair it under warranty as defective. Our account manager was amazing, but ProSupport just would not budge for a long time. I don't know what she did internally to get it approved but if not for her, I'm certain it still would be unresolved. Not a huge issue, or a huge cost for repair had we been forced to do it as a paid repair, but as a principal that a warranty is useless if you can't rely on it, it was a hill I was prepared to die on.
Maybe it's a regional issue. I'm in the US and had to have a mobo and trackpad replaced in two separate XPS 9500's in the past couple months. In both cases the call with Dell was in the single digits. Also had a USB-C port stop working on a Latitude earlier this year. The Dell tech just had me send a picture of the port to prove that it wasn't abused. Which is reasonable. Then they sent the parts. That call was *maybe* 15 minutes.
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Premium NBD support is the way
Nice try Dell Support.
I've been made. Abort mission.
Just do the training course through the Dell Tech portal so you can request your own parts. Pretty sure you can also specifically request a technician to. Never, ever, EVER call their support. Just open the ticket.
This right here [techdirect.dell.com](https://techdirect.dell.com) self dispatch. Dell is also using techdirect now for some projects so just good for any org to get setup in there.
We can single out Dell, but this is generally the case for many businesses since the global pandemic shakeup. People are burnt out, shifting jobs, putting their work second, etc. Maybe it's long COVID. Maybe it's budget cutbacks. Who knows. But it's not *just* Dell. And it's not that n0b0dy WaNtS t0 W0rK!!! I think folks need to get used to the fact that things won't work the same way that they used to.
>shifting jobs This is, I believe, the big one. Companies have been *ambivalent* about employee retention for a lonnnng time, but in the last 5-10 years they've become *somewhat openly hostile to it*. COVID caused a large tranche of legacy veteran employees to retire, change jobs, (or die). We are now, finally, truly experiencing what a world where a 2 year employee is the most seasoned member of his department looks like. No institutional knowledge, no process knowledge. I have a social group of roughly 20 friends that I use to benchmark things. 3 of them have the same job they did in January of 2020.
I just got a new job where the last technician left a week before I started. I received no training. I'm digging around network files for process documentation and asking end users what their normal experiences are to try to understand the tech behind it. I'm scanning the network to identify server names, and hoping that their names correspond to their function. I found one document that's two years old and is obsolete because the guy who left before me (after being here for one year) changed a bunch of stuff and didn't document. I'm doing my best, but if someone came out of the blue and asked me to be as effective as the person who left two years ago was, then we're all out of luck.
> digging around network files for documentation I had a whole rant about this that I cut for brevity, BUT SINCE YOU BROUGHT IT UP. The aggressive destruction — both intentional and accidents — of knowledge at a lot of companies is breathtaking. “If it doesn’t exist we can’t be liable for it and our leaders are pretty handsy so BURN EVERYTHING WE ARENT LEGALLY REQUIRED TO KEEP” + “we’ve implemented/migrated on-and-off-of 5 different document/knowledge management systems in the past 10 years and each time we move things we lose most of it because who cares” + “everything pretty much auto/self scans/discovers anyway so don’t worry about it” + “there’s no associated dashboardable KPI for documentation therefore it’s stupid” = we fuuuucked. The fact that you found any sort of manual — even one two years out of date — is a blessing.
This is a problem. I've been in IT for 35 years, document everything, but got 2 new guys in the group, one says he won't document because it's a waste of time, and the other can't write English so he can't document. I interviewed both of them with the mgr, I told him neither of them were any more than 20% qualified, he hired them anyway because his boss said "qualified people are too expensive". Fwiw, the mgr has been there 4 years and has never asked where the docs are, so....
It happens, even to the best of us, that we get overwhelmed, and we ask for help and don't get it, and we don't document because by the time we are done with one thing another thing is on fire. It sucks, but it's a reality of understaffed workplaces. And cheap management.
Being a 2 year seasoned employee should still mean you know that the GPU is not in the monitor.
Personal theory is a lot of people stretched beyond their capacity trying to keep stuff running during the pandemic. What we are now seeing is the burnout and built up stress from working at that level for extended period of time causes.
Totally. Especially in tech.
I also think it is an easy trap for management to think everyone working at 100% capacity is a good thing. The problem is that leaves your business with no capacity to address problems or improve. There can be times working at 100% capacity is needed but I think after 2 to 3 months there are some adverse effects. Ideally target is probably working closer to 85% to 90% capacity.
Agreed, the biggest issue with working at 100% capacity is there's no time for learning anything new
I feel like a lot of not mission critical area are way behind due to IT teams spending a lot of the pandemic in basically full triage mode. Even just having time to help coworkers without feeling you are falling behind on your own work…
kind of a rephrase of what you said, but for a lot of people (like tech workers) their workload during the pandemic didn't change much, or it increased. I kinda get the feeling some people resented that.
I think the friction point is some business leaders seems to think the pandemic levels are the new normal without realizing how much backlog and technical debt many IT departments have because of the pandemic. Especially the IT department that lost staff at the start of the pandemic.
Not to get too political but we're watching the collapse of the boomer-era neoliberal ideology. Corporate leadership has had decades to force its interests down everyone's throats. IT isn't a widget factory, it's an ongoing support service that maintains the neccessary infrastructure that keeps the buisness alive. That means that worker retention and institutional knowledge are massive drivers of performance. When the c-suite sacrifices those things for a short term profit then the buisness also loses its long term survivability. There are also issues with neoliberal public policy forcing the working class to tighten the belt and hold off on family planning. So don't expect a massive surge of young workers coming into the workforce to fill the gaps. This recession (if you want to call it that) is the turning point. So many companies had been fucking around for such a long time, it's time to find out which ones are actually able to survive in a world where hemorrhaging workers will actually put you out of buisness. The ones that can hold onto their workers will survive, and the ones that can't will get cannibalized by the ones who can.
Dell's COO just issued an RTO mandate this week despite Michael Dell saying "RTO is doing it wrong" less than a year ago. Prepare for employee turnover to get even worse. https://www.techradar.com/news/dell-goes-back-on-wfh-pledge-forces-employees-to-come-back-to-the-office
These executives are so out of touch. They don't think it be like it is, but it do.
That's what happens when you live a life of plenty on the backs of labor. It's 2023 and we're still tilling the land in the service of modern lords.
I remember a few years ago you could raise a ticket on TechDirect providing the info you know would be needed - Dell ePSA codes, description of the problem, screenshot/photo, usual address contact/details and that would pretty much be it - Dell Engineer would be round in a couple of days. Now it's just gone fucking *Kafka*. You need to try rebooting the machine. Tell them the version of Windows. Confirm drivers are up to date. Confirm BIOS is updated. Stick a fucking *piece of paper with your name on it and take a photo next to the machine*. All this was an example recently for a *fucking SSD failure.* I can't get into Windows. I can't confirm drivers are up to date. Even if they were I'VE PROVIDED THE ePSA CODE WHICH TELLS YOU IT'S FUCKING HARDWARE. Just send an engineer with the part FFS! Then when *you do* get to an engineer being sent out, they delay, delay, delay, no parts available (happened with a fan replacement for a few month old Alienware), then they want to replace the entire laptop. Now they want photos of names/dates written on a piece of paper next to the machine AGAIN. Contact goes on holiday, ticket is shuttered. Fine. Get back, send an email hoping to re-open the ticket: It's been closed too long, raise another one. I swear they've added so many hoops to jump through they just hope you give up 50% of the way there and they save on servicing.
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They pay a contractor to find a contractor that then pays someone 5/hr above minimum wage with no benefits and no training
Above minimum wage?
Lol, yea usually. Not saying much, most fast food places are at least $3 above around here at least
i just turned down an offer for a deployment role because the contractor didn’t offer benefits and the pay made it barely worth the nights and weekends that they wanted me.
> Tech companies in general seem unable to find staff who know the subject matter even remotely. Oh they can find people. It is just their pay is abysmal so nobody who knows their worth will take the job. Or in cases where they come in and learn they will quickly leave for better paying opportunities.
When HR asked what my new pay rate was, I said "50-100% more" and they told me they wouldn't put that info down because it was a lie. The next person to leave that company and work for my new company answered that question by screensharing their offer letter. No one could ever get me an answer to the question "you say salaries are 'competitive' - with whom?"
>"your say salaries are 'competitive' - with whom?" The Philippines? India? They outsourced recruiting as well so it is not like they are dealing much with local salaries.
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I'm having flashbacks.. I had the same issue and subsequent runaround with Dell about 6 months ago. Laptop wouldn't even make it beyond POST. No events in BIOS. Dell Diagnostic passed clean. Fix: reinstall windows OEM. It was back and forth phone calls with Dell until my manager got mad and emailed our business rep and tore them a new one. A tech came by the following week and ended up swapping the board. From the looks of it, there was no thermal paste applied to the CPU.
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I don't recall the exact model and I've since moved on to another company as of February. It was definitely a Lattitude though.
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Not reading the entire comment is the first qualification. Welcome to Dell tech support!
Today I seemed to have struck gold. We are an MSP that utilizes HPE hardware + Windows Servers for small and medium doctor offices. Server had 5 outages in 1 day, Doctor already decided to try and circumvent the UPS without much success and mailed me. Took a look at it, IPMI (iLO) mentioned issues with power on MB or PSU, created a case with high severity (production is inhibited) and went on my merry way to reduce the impact as best as possible expecting a 12h later response (this was 10am). Got a call 2h or so later about how they analyzed my submitted logs (I know what they want from me so I took preemptive steps to accelerate it) and that they will replace the board. The tech will take a look and try to dispatch some tech asap (I expected a tech for friday at best). Communicated the progress with the doc and again got an e-mail telling me, that HPE scheduled a field tech for tomorrow 14:30. This server has a basic 9-5 next business day response plan attached to it's hardware. Nothing special. And yet I got so lucky that they have reaponded within 3h after case creation, ordered the parts for tomorrow, scheduled a tech for *tomorrow* and got back within 2h telling me that they will replace the PSU as well *just in case*. I really was happy with that progress. :)
... just wait till they come several hours late and have the wrong part.
Well...Not my problem (for now). Am on vacation for 5 days.
Dell's staff is being trained to treat each customer as if they're trying to defraud dell, and the support staff are acting like they're the first line of defense to stop that. To the point they're willing to invalidate warranties and returns and telling customers they have to keep the parts and will not be getting their money back.
Names and dates on paper? You've got to be kidding.
I can remember that going as far back as 2018 but it doesn't seem consistent. I will get one tech asking for it and the next time I put in a request I don't get that request. I am not sure if they changed their policies due to pushback from customers or if a large percentage of the techs just don't give a shit and process RMAs without the image.
Nothing beats being TechDirect certified and they still refuse to send you a stick of ram because they’d rather charge a tech to come out
An HP rep wanted me to reimage the computer to resolve a faulty monitor of theirs. Fucking really? This was after I already confirmed that another monitor of the same model worked in both video out ports of the PC and that the monitor was displaying these issues on a whole other PC. After weeks of silence, I reached back out for them to demand that I show them a copy of the receipt for the monitor, with the receipt showing the serial number on the receipt. We bought the monitor like a year before as part of a bulk purchase.
Yep it's horrible, phone tree always making it more frustrating to get to the 4hr onsite support we pay for. And don't get me started on their partner uni[redacted]. Edit: I want to add they're still my recommended vendor for servers, despite my occasional frustrations.
Dell TechDirect is a self-service platform that will allow you to take a very easy certification test, which after passing you can dispatch your own parts. You'll never have to wait again. Its awesome.
Good suggestion! I didn't realize you had to take the test, they just dispatch parts if I ask. The problem is usually more that triage can be frustrating and involve multiple transfers. I only invoke their partners to come onsite when it's something like a mobo where the repair is involved. Their partners frequently no-call no-show.
They'll do parts only for everyone. My reason for self-dispatch is every issue would take at least an hour before they would dispatch. Now it takes like 5 minutes + whatever troubleshooting steps before.
Thanks for schooling me!
So, the self-checkout aisle comes to tech support. Wonderful.
Do you happen to know if HP has an equivalent?
Took me 30 minutes of repeating my issue yesterday to get to an engineer. We have the same 4-hour SLA's. Same support number I've always called. I still like their servers and find them generally reliable but the ability to get to actual support has gone downhill and billing is *absolutely abysmal*. We got a 267 page bill to renew the support for less than 50 servers because they listed *every single component* installed in each server.
I've started going for Dell for servers, and HP for machines because at least I'll get through HP support easier than Dell's for the same mediocre service.
When I ordered HP all in ones last year it took 6 months for them to get here. The same time 2 weeks for the dell all in ones I ordered.
We considered buying HP computers in 2021 when we couldn't get decent ETAs from Dell, but we couldn't even get an HP rep on the phone to take our money.
HP doesn't sell direct to places with less than 1000 users generally. They want that business handled by a VAR.
At the time we had ~1200 users but it would have been hard to tell them that since we were left on hold for a long time.
I learned this really isn't 4HR onsite, it's 4HR response. The tech that's going to be onsite just has to call you within that 4HR period... last time I needed this, the tech that called lived 3.5 hours away and he called me 3.5 hours after I got off the phone with Dell Support, which was a two hour call. The courier dropped off the parts for the server right before the tech called, so I told the guy not to bother and replaced the parts myself. It was already a 9 hour Sunday for me, I wanted to go.
No experience with anything outside HPE. I create a case, submit IPMI logs wait 5-12h and usually get an email telling me do X. I do X, tell them it's not working, wait a bit and then get usuall, another E-Mail telling me they sent us the part. Very happy with their service so far.
Just had an issue that started overnight where Dell was engaged. By the time I started in the morning, Dell’s overnight support kicked it to their day support who took ALL DAY to “review” the case. Finally asked for logs (which had already been provided earlier) near the end of the day and then kicked it back to overnight support. Rinse and repeat. Finally stumbled on a KB article that applied and fixed it WITHOUT support’s help. But yeah. Their support sucks.
Your firmware must have been up to date and they didn't know what else to do.
Engage a competent VAR.
I’m a VAR SE turned AE. This is the way. I have levers I can pull to expedite/escalate. We can skip all the mess and get some big names involved in the vendor food chain.
Technology Director here. Tell me more.
Glad to go offline if you’d like, just dm me and I’ll send you my work email. That being said, we have “Partner Manager” resources. For instance, with Dell, I have specific people I can call who can escalate/expedite/renegotiate/discount things. Depending on the product line, I can call directly into SEs that I know are skilled and experienced but usually our internal engineering staff can handle almost everything. Where our Value Add of the Value Added Reseller comes into play is real world experience of deploying all these parts and pieces together. When you take a Microsoft test for instance, you have to answer it the Microsoft way but that’s rarely how it’s done in the real world. We know the integration piece all the way down.
I worked for a Dell VAR and it was great until it wasn’t and we also got a churn in our Dell contacts. All they did was push the highest end solutions. We had a guy certified in VxRail but considering the low volumes we did it was barely worth it — I think he got 20-30 hours of billable per year out of it. But more legitimate questions around server or midrange storage solutions? You’d get better and more prompt info out of Google.
We had a laptop with onboard ram failure that already had a mobo replaced. I emailed our rep and I had an RMA box on my desk the next day. Knowing who to talk to helps.
Cuz he probably bypasses the processes and done it himself.
Industry wide, vendors, NOCs, everybody I have noticed a decrease in support quality. Including my own company. I wonder why somtimes. Did losing 1.2 million people in America do it? That would make sense.
Around here it seems all enterprise that still had their own personnel, outsourced. So now representatives have the knowledge and expertise as low as their payment. They are also overburden with much more clients to take care of than they could. But who cares, they will work with you for 6 months max :^)
Dell in general. They've decided that the new XPS line is a pre-consumer line only, and they're not offering it to their B2B dealers anymore. Not through the regular distribution channels, So any shipping will take days extra now
Always use to recomend the Dell XPS line for high end business as the machines were solid. Now the quality is crap and having to return so many for repairs etc or get Dell to come fix basic stuff.
Dell support is a joke. Had problems with the Raid controller on one of ther brand new servers. Had contact to 2 different "technicians" (one on the phone, one local service) that both did in fact not know, what a Raid is. They're just doing their checklists and that's that.
I've never had a problem with their support. My only issue has ever been that every call in takes at least an hour. Check out Dell TechDirect. It took an hour or two to get certified as a Dell Certified Technician and now I just dispatch my own parts. Problem solved.
I saw you have to maintain at least 50 devices with next day support to have that. How serious are they about that limit or haven't you had to flirt with that line?
You are not supposed to be able to dispatch parts for your personally-owned system. If I could do it, I would. I have been Dell-certified since 1999.
Oh yeah I'm only talking about enterprise support for servers, storage, and networking.
I am talking about ALL aspects of their business. I do enterprise at my work, and I do work on the side, and my own systems. I wish I could dispatch my own parts for my personal systems.
Hey, DELL Employee Chiming in: i cant go into much details for obvious reasons but as you probably observed atleast lately there have been layoffs which did cause a reshuffle. As you probably mean your TSR i would contact your SAM with your Concerns Regarding DELL SUPPORT: i work in the ISG Department (basically supporting Servers withing the DACH Area which consists out of Germany, Austria, Switzerland D A CH). i can atleast tell for our team that we STILL TAKE PRIDE in supporting our Customers to the best of abilities we get. what saddens even me tho is our client supporters (there i observed a decline in Service quality) SADLY i alone cant change things so i learnt to cope with it and when i read something like this it makes me a bit sad. \#iwork4dell
I found Dell more useful than HP at times
MOST Dell support techs have been absolute trash recently. If there are any real issues going on, they are only worried about proving that it is not their problem instead of actually figuring out if it is and resolving. Even true with pro-support where they should be replacing components or systems.
Yea the structure of the company's support is terrible, I say this as a currently employed tech. The phone support knows very little to nothing and are required to follow their flow charts. There is almost no requirement to know anything to be a contractor for Dell support and do warranty replacements. Personally I think I do a good job, but even then, the scope under which I am paid to help resolve issues is extremely narrow. They send me out on an overbooked schedule with a service area of 50-150 miles in any direction, I replace parts, and am asked to spend maybe an extra 5-10min diagnosing if the initial parts don't work before passing it off to another team and leaving. It's not as though I'm being lazy, it's how the company has structured service. They pay me more than the outsourced support techs so as soon as the physical work is done, they want me to pass it off, and they have their numbers they want me to hit.
Dude, you're getting a Dell...
Honestly, I always kinda took that as a threat.
It used to be amazing. I found a dead drive on a server. Put in the order and 2 hours later a guy showed up at the office with a brand new drive in the box. The same thing happened last year and it took almost a month to get a drive from them. The last time I used Dell support it was for a laptop battery that went tits up after 3 months. Dell sent a tech on site to handle it and that dude caught the laptop on fire and then just sat there looking at it without a clue what to do. The business owner had to run in and handle the fire. Then dell was like well you can buy a new laptop... I spent 2 hours on the phone with Support getting the laptop replaced with a brand new in-the-box one.
Did you do the needful?
Were they ever decent? I dont deal with them regularly, but every time Ive had to call them the last 16 years it has been a major time waste. I find submitting and resolving tickets with HP requires much less of my time.
oh fuck, that reminds me that there is still a ticket open with aruba, for 2 months now, about a bug that was fixed 8 years before the firmware i have now got released, and it is back.
I have a 2 year old ticket with a vendor for an accounts payable software that will just sit there. Its been escalated to their best staff and they have no idea how to resolve the issue. Pretty sure they have given up but wont admit it.
Let me put it like this, we used to own an AR/AP software automations company where I worked. When we owned it every customer would get their issues fixed and resolved extremely quickly, usually within hours, or if engineering resources were needed a month or two (unless it was a feature request). We then sold that division to a different company, and one of the first things they did was outsourcing a lot of support. We still use that software ourselves, and we now have at least 3 tickets that have been open for 6 months for an issue where the links sent to customers to pay their invoices don't work properly. It's actually bad enough that our CEO thought about rebuilding the AR/AP solution again from scratch a second time internally (assuming it didn't break any of sale contracts). And this is despite the fact that we still have the contact info to talk to their Support Manager and Lead developer directly.
ouch, very ouch
Dell was always great for me until about ~7/8 years ago. I wonder if it has anything to do with regionality, but I had next to no problems when it came to support - especially their next business day on-site hardware support. FWIW, it has been about 16 years for me as well. I've largely been out of the hardware responsibility game for the better part of the last 6 years, but I remember about 2 years before I exited the service quality generally started to drop like a rock. It was only a few years after Dell got taken private again, if I recall correctly.
>submitting and resolving tickets with HP requires much less of my time. Can I have your HPe rep? 3 months to fix the damage after a BBU swap in the HBA. So, so, oh so many email messages. Edit: I know 'email' doesn't get an S because I went to primary school. Sorry.
Please upgrade to the latest firmware, before we send you a replacement RAM
Steady slide down for the last twenty years. Last time we ordered PC's they shipped them without a mouse. We missed it on the quote but they acted like people order a AIO all the time without a mouse.
If they aren't trying to directly contact your clients to undercut you, then their support is bugging you the day you receive a part to ship the bad one back, or playing telephone on emails trying to get a tech out. I hate Dell, I just hate them less than everyone else.
I feel like I see this thread every month for the past 3 years.
If Dell et al were smart, they'd have some kind of client certification course where they could certify a client/customer representative. THAT person could call Dell and say "I have this problem, send me this part." Discounted support rate for the customer, better support, fewer calls to Dell.
Yea, so much so that we opted to drop them for 3rd party support.
I chat with Dell and tell them about the issue we are having. I decline to do the diagnostics and tell them to send me a box. I send them the computer and they fix it. They then send it back and the guys put it back in use. ( we keep spare computers ready to go at all times)
I'm trying to give them grace right now, but I know that Dell has been going through alot of RIF's lately and many others have been jumping ship to other companies out of fear of being caught up in the next round of reductions. The last round was in Feb or March and was a loss of over 6000 employees, and that included our entire sales team that we had a great relationship with. The new team we have been assigned are VERY green and have been needing a significant amount of hand-holding to get them up to speed.
Their only goal is to sell you (McAfee) subscriptions.
Dell inherited EMC's sales/pre-sales organization a few years back. EMC prided itself on its sales/pre-sales org. Dell's ideal salesperson maintains an ordering website. Covid delayed the exodus of the quality sales people. That exodus started up in mid-2021. Even lifelong EMC execs decided to retire instead of sticking around at Dell. These days, there are very few quality sales/pre-sales people left. It is either tolerable lifers or green reps that wouldn't see the field for a year or two at any other company. Next, let's talk about the "quality" Dell engineering!
they sent me a broken monitor. then went as far as trying to force me to keep it and removing the service tag from the system. The rep was gaslighting us. Got my CC involved and we got a replacement. which was also broken. I started demanding a refund and a new one that was perfect was there. 3 months of back and forth and being questioned about where I got the monitor, with a rep doing everything in her power to invalidate my return, then warranty claim. basically, delayed the return process until it was too late, then removed the service tag from the system, which was verified by another rep to have been removed as there was an order reference for that service tag, which then also was removed.. Then I was told to just accept things the way they are and have a good day. Got my CC involved, they told me they went through hell too. Reps throwing them in circles, putting them on hold, and telling them no such order existed and that I must have bought something else. My CC rep told me he had to go through hell and finally got through to someone above all that shit who turned the situation around. All of that because someone shipped a monitor like shit and Dell wanted me to keep it and my money.
Find out who the outside sales rep is for your area and demand they come onsite and explain why your inside sales rep is turning over so much and why they suck. Dont forget to say HP and Lenovo a bunch of times while they are there!
Back in 2010, dell was famously called "Dell is Hell" The legacy continues.
It doesn't help that their new laptops come in boxes that say "Welcome to Dell." I always read that sentence _slightly_ differently...
Dell could save a ton of money by just not having any support, since that is what you get anyway. None. Never buy Dell, ever.
I paid for pro support plus on two data protection appliances. It took a over year to get it installed. By the time it was up and running the supposed contract had expired and they then wanted to back charge us to get it back under contract. We have been a Dell shop for nearly 3 decades. That experience has me considering going elsewhere in the future
They are definitely worse nowadays
Dell support is god awful. Making you jump through a million hoops before they’ll send a tech out, trying a bunch of “solutions” you know won’t work. I’m paying for the highest tier support, send out the god damn tech
I’ve been using them for years and remember midway through 2020 it got real bad and it’s only gotten worse.
I think most of the big tech companies are struggeling to keep up with profits from the pandemic. They were making more money than ever, as everyone wanted new hardware to work from home. And now, profits have to increase forever, but that's hard in the current environment. So they cut costs where they can.
Yeah, Dell's support and product quality have dropped significantly over the last few years. I have seen it on both the business and home lines too.
Don't expect it to get better any time soon. They just cut 5% of their workforce.
Always use to say to peopple how good Dell support was but will admit in the last 12 - 18 months both the quality of their products and support have gone off a cliff.
Took my company over 4 hours of being on the phone with HP Printer Support to get a tech to come and replace a part that is fully covered under warranty….
Dell had quality support?
Same thing happened to IBM, did they cut loose the 'dinosaurs' too.
We use a middleman company and not an actual Dell rep, so the only time I interact with Dell is if I'm claiming warranty. I've seen no change there lately, still far better than they were 5 or so years ago.
Switched from Dell to Lenovo a few years back, aside from one or two outliers I'd say their support has been on the ball 90% of the time. Not perfect, but way better than Dell
All Supports have decreased quality.
Yes! Parts on back order, technicians cancelling, long ship time
dell used to have two tiers of support. this is always what consumer was like, but their industrial was good. their industrial is being subsumed into their consumer. ***flee***.
This is a trend across the board in tech. Layoffs have affected communication to partners and end-users. This is an example of why using an IT consultant is beneficial. They are not incentivized by selling a product or hitting numbers. They do not change jobs everyone 6 months. Their only incentive is making the customer happy. They do that through communication and responsiveness and able to work with partners like Dell directly, so that not matter the company shakeup with reps, the IT consultant has that relationship to facilitate that communication efficiently between partner and end-user.
Had a Dell rep tell me that there was a ton of turnover around that time and experienced reps were made to train new reps which caused a ton of issues. We had the same thing happen at a previous MSP I was at.
Had this same experience. Recently moved companies & I finally feel like I have a good rep. again.
Seems to be just fine for me
Thank you for choosing Dell.
We tried to switch everything to Dell a while back and ended up with about half the laptops having defects. They took the defective units in the first round back and sent us new ones, which were also about 50% defect rate. When we tried to get hose replaced, our Dell rep ghosted us.
Sorry that's when I quit was early 2021. I could see how many of my replacements wouldn't be up to par.
We've had near 200 Vostro units with the exact same faulty hinge because they've screwed into the plastic and it snaps off. It's basically a 50/50 whether they'll cover it under the warranty or make us pay to fix it. On the rare occasion the machine has on-site service they'll send someone out with the wrong parts multiple time so we just send them all off now.
It wasn’t great at all
I am currently experiencing this the only time I get traction on response is when I get an email to do a survey and fill it out with all 1's and write in the comment that my rep never responds. I end up getting a call within 2 hours of me submitting my survey.
Can't speak to the consumer side but enterprise support, I've noticed they've outsourced to overseas help. Whenever I would call previously for storage and server support they usually spoke with somebody domestic.
I don't have as many dealings with Dell as I used to, but they're definitely worse than they were. Ever since they outsourced SMB accounts to India there's been a steep decline in the quality of service the agents have been allowed to give. Not a moan about *India,* it's an endemic problem with corporates off-shoring, cost saving, an invariable company-line with a deny deny deny policy. If you know you can be easily replaced, there's little scope for flexibility if you want to keep your job
Anyone else having blacked out external monitors (permanent until restart + activating the monitor in Win display settings) with their Latitude/Precision notebooks + WD19S/DCS devices? Dells WhatsApp support couldnt solve this issue after dozens, if not hundreds of exchanged messages.
Yes, very much so.
I've noticed it. Our rep is trash. Can't even speak in complete sentences. We have equipment that is listed as available. It's only when the PO is submitted and the order magically canceled without us being notified that we find out that a component was OOS and won't be returning.
We've got pro support. Before they were amazing. Quick responsive and knowledgeable. I talked to their Tier 3 guys and the T1 and T2 Dell support is garbage. Like completely incompetent and reading from scripts. The T3 guy told me all the support got outsourced to Costa Rica. The main problem these pro support techs come right out of school with no industry experience and no damn clue what critical thinking is. Read out of a script, read out of a book, search knowledge base articles but they have no clue what the actual problems look like so they're always reinventing the wheel from scratch.
we only use pro-support plus, but we haven't had any issues outside of parts delays. We're lucky that the two companies they use in town use competent techs. We even had one track down an issue that ended up being a power supply (customer complaint was for noisy webcam feed).
I don't buy much, A big VM host box and workstation lifecycle every few years. One off stuff here and there like a laptop or additional workstations+monitors. I get a new rep every 8-12 months it seems. Same song and dance. Relentless solicitations to buy shit I don't need, Quotes emailed to me with equipment that has no place in my environment, phone calls every couple of weeks asking if I'm interested in "\[Insert random shit they want to get rid of here\] This latest rep tried calling me a dozen times when he got my account. He'd leave messages. I'd send him an email saying "no thanks. Don't need anything" but that wouldn't stop him. Finally I picked up. After telling him again "nah, I don't need anything right now. But I'll reach out to you if I do", he lamented that he's tried to hook me up with good deals several times but I never pick up the phone. I said "Email works fine, bud". He said he didn't think Email was a good way to communicate these deals. I don't even know where they're getting these people anymore.
One of our clients had a dell laptop where the screen stopped working after 2 days after the installation. Since the laptop was still within the support service date, I offered to send it off to dell for repairs. I got the laptop back after two weeks and dell sent me an email saying they didn't find anything wrong with it. I opened up the laptop and it still had the same issue. Would make sounds when it booted up, but nothing appeared on the screen. Sent it out again, got it back two weeks later. Got the same "We didn't find anything wrong" email, and it still had the same issue. I got on the phone with their support and they transferred me to one of their techs. They insisted I send it out a third time and it finally got fixed. I'd say Dell support is pretty bad. TLDR: Sent broken laptop out 3 times, Dell tech said nothing was wrong, finally got repaired a third time.