Disgraceful customer support...

I am the owner of a Dell Studio 1737.  I bought the machine in January 2009, and within six months the absolutely woefully designed slot optical drive died.  Phoned Dell - £100 later an engineer came out and replaced it.  I signed up for 5 day customer support at this point for a further £100...

Last Sunday, October 3rd, the slot drive decided to pack up again.  Phoned Dell on Monday morning and an engineer duly arrived on Thursday October 7th to replace the optical drive.  When installing the drive he noted that the previous engineer had left a bracket that holds the drive in place off my machine and he called Dell support in India to arrange for the part to be despatched so that he could replace it this morning.  In the meantime the CD player was working perfectly.  So far so good.

The engineer returned this morning (Friday October 8th) to install the bracket as planned.  I was on a conference call when he finished the job, but he assured me that all was working fine.   When I got back to my home office a couple of hours later and went to install a CD - guess what the same problem as reported on the Sunday had returned.  Obviously the machine was not working when the engineer left earlier in the day.

So call Dell in India to get the engineer back to fix up his mistake today as any normal business would do...but no not possible...can he come tomorrow, Saturday...not possible.  After 1.5 hours on the phone I finally spoke to a senior manager in Dell India who advised me that the reason they could not get someone back today was because they do not actually have the facility to speak to their service partners in the UK...and further he could only get someone back to fix my machine on Monday...however he would guarantee that it was done at 8:30am.

Twenty minutes ago I get a call from Dell's UK support team telling me that their engineer will be with me between 9:30am and 5:30pm on Monday...does the right hand not know what the left hand is doing in this company?   They tell me that they can not guarantee a time to come a visit me.  If I offered my customers paid for service like this I would be bankrupt.

The problem I have is that I will be out of the country from Monday PM for the week...so the laptop remains unrepaired for another week...while I wil have to work from home for a third day to compensate for Dell's incompetence. 

One thing is for certain, I will not be buying another Dell computer if this is the best they can do (contrast this with the service from Apple)...that is if I still have job because of all the time I have to have off work to wait for Dell's incompetent engineers to visit me....

Fortunately, I control my company's IT expenditure so I will have my revenge by ensuring that no Dell systems are ever purchased by us again.

A disgraceful experience all round....