No more "Chat online with a Dell Support Representative"?

[boredevilperson.livejournal.com]

Went to get support on a Dell Precision 330 that (like many other Dells we've bought in the past couple of years) had a hard drive die. (At least this user keeps good backups) At least this system was still under warranty (by 15 more days) I just get a new HD overnighted, pop it in and load it up. Still annoying however.

Is Dell no longer doing the "Chat online with a Dell Support Rep" thing?

I loved that setup! I got ahold of a tech online within 30 seconds and had replacement parts sent out right away. If it was something that needed to be worked out over the phone they just called and we went through it.

I did notice though that their e-mail support tool doesn't have the message where it basically said "Use this only if you don't need help right away" so maybe they've beefed that up a bit more?

Either way I ended up doing the usual "Call and wait on hold" thing. I then got a support rep who I'm fairly certain is from India. This guy I actually liked though. He wasn't too hard to understand, friendly and didn't stick to a script like some of them do. I still am not happy about tech jobs being sent out there mind you . . . ;-)

Comments

[bdinger.livejournal.com]

I agree with you fully. Since we have some big IBM iron, my company is lucky enough to have an IBM "direct" rep, meaning that instead of going through 18 different menus I just enter an access code and get transferred to a live human in California. No matter if it's a problem with our quarter million dollar iSeries, or a problem with one of the ThinkCenter desktops.

Like recently, i needed a new motherboard for one of the ThinkCenters. I was on the phone all of two minutes, and a repair tech was here within the hour.

Dell in my one or two experiences hasn't been horrible. They seem to figure out that if you know what you are doing, they can just send the part out.

Qwest, otoh, is far and above the worst - and all their reps are in the US! I called requesting some PTR's set for a block of IP's we have with them. The tech insisted that i need to change DNS servers and everything would be fine.

Right... umm.. yeah.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

I can't help but parse that as "StinkCenters".

[boredevilperson.livejournal.com]

ROTFLMAO

[boredevilperson.livejournal.com]

I've had good and bad with Dell. Mostly pretty decent.

One time though I was ready to throw the phone through the window. This lady (from India) kept me on the phone for 45 minutes to diagnose that yes the CD-ROM drive on this GX110 is completely dead. It has power, it will not slide open. The BIOS settings will not affect this. Particularly if you just had me disconnect the drive from the motherboard.

And then tell me that I *HAVE* to have a tech come on site and install the new one for me. lol

Other than that though my experiences with dell support have been pretty positive. "Oh ok you've done this and that and it's still showing up? Yup ok we'll send you this part need a tech? No? Good have a nice day!"

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

The second tech you mentioned? Probably me.

If you tell me what you've done so far, and make it sound good, I'll believe you.

I'll double-check a few things, just to make sure you didn't miss anything, but I'm not making you crack open the case and reseat cables AGAIN if you told me you've already done it, and tell me step by step how you did it.

I've had too many people just call in and say "Yeah my hard drive's dead, i ran your diagnostics it gave me errors."
At which point I always ask "For documentation purposes, which errors were they?"

Answer is always ".....uh............uh............i dunno."

And in my experience, the GX110's CD drive is ALWAYS bad. =/

[boredevilperson.livejournal.com]

I may have determined that the drive was kaput before I called yes but I didn't fight the lady on any of her troubleshooting.

What got me is the 40 minutes on the phone with her was spent repeating steps and processes. We went through a couple of things a few times.

Thoughout the conversation too I think they scripted in general small talk questions for her (a tech from India) to ask. "How's the weather out there? Uh huh uh huh uh huh" Which bothered me a bit ;-)

Though the best was the time one Dell person felt compelled to tell me about how he loves artwork and drawing and he goes to shows etc etc etc. All the while I'm thinking "Just finish up and send me the part please . . ."

Really? They go bad that often? That's the only one of ours that I know of that's gone bad . . . Though I don't think our users use their CD-ROM drives terribly often.

How about GX150s and their hard drives? It seems that every single GX150 we've purchased at my company has had to have a hard drive replaced under warranty because the system wouldn't recognize it anymore one day. (drives also wouldn't work in other systems)

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

Who knows.

I just don't like the 110's that much. Probably b/c they're all mostly integrated crap(i was literally dragged away from the teardown gx270's b/c I hate integrated parts that much) and that's all we use at our individual desks.

To be honest, "drive not recognized" is not something I see too much of. Usually it's a Seek/Read failure. The read heads just usually up and die more often(in hard drives in general that is) than the IDE controllers.

It's probably just that the 110's and the 150's are so friggin old. I actually saw a 150 the other day that had a DVD drive shipped with it and it took me three minutes scratching my head to realize that yes, DVD drives are old enough to have shipped with 150's.

[boredevilperson.livejournal.com]

That's weird then. Maybe we just got the cursed batch of GX150s ;-) Though we did order them on and off for the entire model run before jumping to GX240s . . . Oh well I think they all are humming away happily with their new (and in some cases double sized) hard drives lol

lol Actually when I think about it a friend of mine had a DVD drive included in a Pentium II 450 PC he bought in . . . hmmm either '98 or '99 Amazes me now that I think of it because those just seem like recent technology to me as well.

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

mmm gx240s. Those were nice for their times. Wait till you see the GX280. My only complaint = no PS/2 ports. No one can type fast enough to justify a USB keyboard. NO ONE.

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

And we're not on the phone, you don't have to explain to me that you double-swapped known-good hard drives and systems to prove that the drive's not recognized ;-p

[boredevilperson.livejournal.com]

lol sorry I always make explanations as detailed as possible. Force of habit.

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

You should see my case-files.

We had a call-logging program revision that started cutting off casefiles that got too long, and I seemed to be the only one that complained about it.

They just patched it again, and it quit doing that, though. So my novellas are safely tucked away under people's service codes =D

[boredevilperson.livejournal.com]

Argh got this notification late lol

Anyway Oh yeah I agree on that however I think the idea is to have USB replace PS2 so people don't have to figure out what cable goes where. You know matching up the purple and the green is hard to do (for my users at least)

[boredevilperson.livejournal.com]

lol

We used to have a home grown call logging system where I am. Really the director and programming manager just slepped something together in PHP because we needed it. It was something but it really limited you in what you could do.

Early '03 we replaced it with an open source program called Zentrack which allowed for LONG LONG entries attachments etc. I was asked to not put so much in the ticket. My novels were fine but I was attaching all the backups for it voicemails faxes etc I was eating up space pretty quickly lol