Poor Customer Service, India Outsourcing Communication Problems

I ordered a 1,400 dollar monitor from Dell and they made the process very difficult and wasted many hours of my time.

Here's the story.. I chatted with online support to ask about price matching regarding a 30 inch monitor I was interested in for my computer graphics work. They were helpful about responding to my inquiries and I eventually found a slightly cheaper product match from Walmart that they were willing to match -the issue came about when it came time to pay for the product.. The chat support person ran my credit card and it got declined -she had entered exp date incorrectly. She apologized and after running it again she claimed that the order had gone through and I got confirmation email from Dell.

Later I double checked with the bank and found no order was pending. I contacted customer support via phone and a rep confirmed that order had been declined. Once again, we ran the info and the order was confirmed. The rep also told me that I would be getting 2 day shipping as promised in the deal as opposed to receiving the item at a date about two weeks from when I ordered (which the chat person had quoted to me).

Eventually after some troubles with delivery from Fed ex I got my monitor in working condition. A couple days later I got a call from Dell India support. They told me that my credit card was declined and that they needed to run it again. This was very frustrating because the Indian rep was having a hard time understanding what I was saying and had a very thick accent herself but I could still understand her. Having received several scam calls from "India Microsoft" I was not going to give out information to an unknown incoming call and so I told her I would check my bank statement and call dell directly.

When I did call Dell directly, I was connected with a support person in India again. They were very happy that I was trying to resolve the payment issue but because of system difficulties were unable to process my order at that time. "Please call back tomorrow" I thought to myself I have never seen a company struggle so much to allow a customer to pay for a product and now I wasting a lot of time because of their outsourced support issues.So, the next day they call again at 8:05am and we go through the process again. Again the rep has a hard time understanding me and has a hard time skipping through the script to get to the point where we do a payment. at one point, she actually asked if my "middle" initial went before or after my first and last name!! How can people not be trained about taking info down correctly and learn what a "middle" initial is? Here's a hint about placement.. A middle initial goes in middle! At the end of the transaction she said she would have to call me back in a while and that my payment confirmation would be "mailed" to me! Why on earth would payment confirmation need to be mailed (like through the postoffice)??

Later I got a call from Dell India again and they said the payment went through. I checked my bank statement and there was no charge in there again!!! I called my bank and the rep said they had denied the charge because of the number of consecutive attempts to charge in such a small time frame. I told him to please let the charge go through no matter how many times and we can struggle with the mess later - as long as Dell get's their money!! So I guess I will be expecting another annoyingly robotic (and broken English) call from the support folks in India!

I like some of the products that Dell offers but this kind of hassle is not worth it! The support seems to all be outsourced now and it's not at all working out so well for the customer!  I don't see the point in ever buying a Dell product again and I don't feel i can recommend dealing with Dell to any of my visual effects co-workers ever again either.