No Longer a Dell Customer

Let me start by stating that our company has spent thousands of dollars purchasing dell products in the last several months and today we decided to purchase 2 alienware laptops for our marketing department. We've had a dell business credit line of $5k for some time and have used and paid it off several times over the last year. This evening we decided to put together a purchase for 2 alienware laptops totaling around $7500. We had an existing $3800 credit left and wanted to pay the remainder of the balance with a corporate card. So, we pull up chat and asked the rep to outline the process for splitting the payment between 2 cards. The support rep told us that he'd process the order and have another rep call us to complete the payment. In addition, he told us about putting us on the Dell advantage program for a gift card credit and 2nd day delivery. The person who called asked for the account number and once he pulled it up he told us that he could not process the transaction because we had a business account. Once again, this had already been stated and made clear to the previous rep. He told us that we needed to speak to another department which we had to request to be transferred to. We were transferred to an automated menu which took us to a message stating that they were closed.

We then tried calling the business number again, having to navigate a bunch of options which took us to no one.  Finally, we got back on chat and explained the situation again, that we had a business credit line and corporate credit card and wanted to finalize our purchase. The rep went through the same song and dance verifying everything and when we asked if we were added to the dell advantage program we were then told we would not qualify for this option as it was only available to personal accounts. Moments after that, our chat ended for some mysterious reason.

Five minutes later we received a phone call from the rep telling us that dell alienware laptops could not be purchased using dell business credit lines.  He then suggested buying one of their dell precision lines instead.

First of all, ?  Who in their right mind would think that they could dictate to a corporation how they should purchase their preferred business products?  Whether or not we purchase alienware's or precision notebooks is of no concern to them.  The fact that they would suggest this limitation on the use of the dell business credit line is ignorant being that there is only dozens upon dozens of other options. For a corporation trying to take their company private, it seems ignorant to be turning down any sizable purchases, not to mention drive customers away. If we have a dell business credit line, then logic would dictate that we probably have credit cards as well. Far be it for us to offer to use Dell's credit line, thus making them more money. Not only did they just lose this $7500 purchase, they've now lost our future use of the credit line as well as any future hardware purchases. There are many other competitors that offer comparable products.

When you want to get a burger for lunch you can get that same burger from a number of vendors, but you tend to go to the one that treats you the best. Common sense is not so common and dell was kind enough to illustrate this to our company today.  Thank you for saving us the aggravation as we will no longer be including dell as hardware solution when purchasing PC's or Servers. Instead, we will spend our money with a direct competitor and pass our experience with dell along to 10 business associates in the hopes that they pass it along to 10 business associates that they know.  Best of luck on your amazing business strategy.