This thing on? HORRIBLE customer support on Dell Venue 8 Pro--CAUTION to buyers

I hope someone reads this prior to purchase to save themselves a huge PITA and waste of time.

I gave Dell another chance after avoiding them for many years, I had a bad experience with build quality two notebooks in a row. The Venue 8 Pro looked like it had a lot of good points and was reasonably priced.

So here's the interaction...

I tried plugging it in this morning and the USB cable didn't seat all the way in and the LED didn't light. Hmm. I took a look in the port on the tablet and can see a wire from the connector is bent back and exposed. Nice and shiny. That's going to be a problem.

I called Technical support and after a long hold time was connected to a very polite guy. Unfortunately he had real difficulty understanding me (and I him) do to his strong Indian accent. No big deal I hoped, it's a global business after all. We managed to communicate, albeit excruciatingly slowly. I let him know about the exposed port wire issue and I requested a return of the device.

He asked me several times if I had dropped the tablet or spilled anything on it. I answered his questions twice (he repeated the call script) and refused to answer them the third time.

He then asked me to plug the device in, despite me saying at least a dozen times at this point that there was no hope of an electrical connection. He would not budge from the process.

He would not transfer me to a supervisor. He said he wasn't permitted until the troubleshooting steps had ALL been performed.

FAIL.

Customer service is customer service, NOT process service. It was plain as day he was working through a script and hadn't the least interest in either saving me time or solving problems.

I have 4 days left to return this to where I bought it. I will do so and will also share this story as a lesson learned in the hopes that 1) Dell gets a chance to respond and fix the training and process issues (they are private now so I hope they can learn to move fast) 2) others can add this to their consideration of which of the many many 8" Windows tablets they should purchase.

I will be exploring another manufacturer today.

Pity.

Regards,

Rob