An open letter to Dell Technical Support

At risk of having Dell remove this post, here is an open letter to Dell Technical Support based on my experiences with Dell's regular technical support, their ProSupport for businesses, and their Your Tech Team Unlimited support.

I truly hope that Dell reads this, learns from it, and implements improvements to their technical support programs.

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Dell has proven time and again that its customer support has has serious problems.  Across multiple support issues in just the past months, Dell has failed basic concepts of customer support and technical support.  To summarize the issues and the rules that Dell should implement to fix these problems:

1. I asked a question about the time length of my order's delivery.  I got a response about credit cards.  Support Rule #1: stay on topic
2. I asked a question about missing software from my order.  The response from the customer support team was to contact technical support.  Support Rule #2: each support department handles its own problems and don't shuffle their problems onto another department that isn't supposed to handle it.
3. I send multiple emails to the official support teams.  Only once did I receive a human response; all other responses were only automated responses.  Support Rule #3: make sure that no support emails are left unanswered.  Support Rule #4: all emailed issues that are unresolved by automated responses are answered by a human.
4. When I called to get a refund for downgrading my extended warranties for the 2 recent laptop orders (already disappointed in the support I'd received so far).  I had to talk to a total of 20 people for 4 hours and 40 minutes.  There were multiple Dell failings here:
   1. Many people asked for a lot of information redundantly and talked with me for a long time before finally simply saying I was in the wrong department and then passing me on to the next person.  Support Rule #5: get customers to right department quickly
   2. Most of the support people had no idea what I was talking about when I asked about downgrading my warranty from "Premium" to "Advanced", which are the terms used on the order site during the order process.  One pair of people used the terms "Premium Advanced" and "Premium" in place of "Premium" and "Advanced", respectively.  Support Rule #6: make sure that support people understand terms that customers are seeing, use the same terms used on the main ordering site, and don't make up new terms.
   3. When transfering me to a new department, I frequently was transfered to the wrong department, sent back to the main operator to start the process over again, and occasionally disconnected.  Support Rule #7: make sure that customers are transfered to right department.
5. When sending out a feedback survey, be sure to use terms and ID numbers that customers can easily search on.  This is Support Rule #8.

As a side note: I spent CONSIDERABLE time (beyond just the time dealing with the warranty refund) on hold to such an extent that now I can not stand the sound of the pre-recorded "on-hold" female announcer telling me "To go online at support.dell.com" over and over and over again.  Please, get rid of the message, play 99% music, and occasional say "you call is important to us".