Great Products, Terrible management

On 16 November 2018, I placed an order with Dell (Internet Receipt Number: GB2006-9676-46568) for a complete new system, comprising an XPS 8930 Tower PC, a P2219H Monitor, and an AE215 Speaker System. I was informed that the monitor and speaker system and monitor would be delivered before the Tower, for reasons that only became apparent later – the inventory at the assembly plant had not been kept up to date and an internal component was not available. The monitor and speaker system were delivered on 21 November. The PC arrived on about 13 December. On 15 December, I opened the boxes to start putting everything together, but discovered that the Power Cord for the monitor had not been included in the box. I immediately raised this with Dell Customer support, providing the details of my order and repeating the full description of the missing part from the order/invoice, and was informed in a reply (Dell service request # <<#2366336-23670552-33052010#>>) from Sreelakshmi Tirumala, Senior Customer Care Associate for UK and Ireland, that she would raise a request for the replacement power cord and would give me an update once it has been done. On 19 December, she asked me to look at a Power cord online and confirm that it was what I needed. It was not. She again said that a replacement has been raised, and that once it had been approved from the concern team, a case specialist would get back to you to assist me further. On 21 December, I queried her silence and began to express some irritation at the lack of action. This time, she claimed that the ‘order was pending to book.’ On 24 December, I again expressed extreme annoyance at the response, only to be told by her that the person who was dealing with your case was out of the office. On 28 December, I had still received no communication, but could not understand why the absence of one person from the office was responsible for the delay. Tis time the response came from K S Suman, another Senior Customer Care Associate for UK and Ireland, one of the case specialists in Dell, who was replying on behalf of Edwin Besterwitch, another Senior Customer Care Associate for UK and Ireland who was out of the office, and again claimed that he had asked the concerned team to book the power cord that was missing from the order and would update me once this is shipped out. I told him that I expected an explanation as to why, two weeks after I raised this complaint, I had still not been given a definite date for the dispatch of the missing part. On 31 December, he then said that the part which was originally intended to be sent with the order was no longer available and checking for an alternate part took some time. On 6 January, I told him that this saga was likely to be an embarrassment to Dell’s senior management. All I got back was more apologies and excuses. When I complained about that, I finally had a message on 8 January from Edwin Besterwitch informing me that the part had been handed to UPS to deliver on or about 9 January, and giving me a URL for the UPS tracking service, but not the UPS tracking number, which is essential! On 9 January, he then gave me the tracking number but also said that and the order will be delivered by a service engineer and not the normal carriers. It arrived that day, but the packaging was dumped, slightly damaged, on our front door step in public view while we were out for a few hours. Since then I’ve had several requests for a photo of the damaged package and a standard customer satisfaction survey. Satisfied I am not. The so called ‘customer care’ team are either incompetent or ineffective, or both, but the real problems are higher up this company. The manager of this team is clearly unable to select, organise, train and monitor his staff, and/or to advocate the problems they face to more senior management. Even if the part originally mentioned in the order/invoice - a two metre power cord to connect a standard Dell monitor to a standard UK power socket – was no longer available, it remains the case that, if I ordered the same monitor on the day I began to complain, an appropriate power cord would have been available to be supplied with it. The fact that Dell could not immediately produce one indicates that there is something seriously wrong with the company’s management of its product specifications or its inventory management, or both.