I posted on Monday that my support call to Dell for my XPS m1330 laptop resulted in a commitment to come out for my “Next Day Onsite Service” possibly as late as a week later. Here’s how it actually went down.
On Tuesday, I got a call from a man named Radu, a service technician working for Dell. I think he is actually the employee of a third party firm, not Dell proper, but he informed me that he already had the new motherboard in his possession, and could he come by that day and install it? Sure you can! So, he showed up a few hours later, in a monster snowstorm, full of good humor and smiles, and proceeded to take the laptop apart at amazing speed, reassembling it with equal alacrity.
Unfortunately, it didn’t fix the problem. I still had the weird rainbow screen. He determined that the original phone support tech had misdiagnosed the problem, and ordered me a new display panel, plus a replacement for one of the access panels underneath that he’d noticed a truly minuscule crack in. He then departed, promising to return as soon as the new parts arrived.
Wednesday arrived and I got a call from Radu. The parts had not made it to the service center. This clearly was not anyone’s fault at Dell or their service vendor, since we still had the monster snowstorm going on. Nonetheless he was apologetic and told me Thursday would be the day. On Thursday morning Radu called; he had the parts, could he come by and install them? Sure you can! He gave me a time window, noon to 2:00. At 1:55 he called and said he would be there in about 15 minutes, apologizing for the delay, and true to his word he was there in 15 minutes. He took the system apart again with the same amazing speed while we chatted about Linux and FreeBSD, put it back together, booted it successfully, shook my hand, and left. He was even considerate enough to call Dell and get permission to leave the panel with me that he’d replaced, because that particular panel has the Windows license sticker on it, and even though the machine has never booted to Windows (nor will it, while I own it) still it’s good to have that in case I ever sell the laptop.
So, I have a working laptop, on Thursday and not next Monday as I’d feared. I cannot say enough about Radu’s professionalism, courtesy, and customer service skills. Is it all good? Well, mostly it is. The only fly in the ointment is the original Dell phone support tech’s misdiagnosis of the issue, which cost me the two extra days. But the service I received otherwise makes me inclined to let that slide. It’s too bad Dell put my hackles up by telling me it might take a week, but I’m glad it didn’t.
So, thank you, Radu. You repaired not only my laptop, but Dell’s reputation too.
I’m pretty sure that all field service personnel that do work for Dell actually are employed by 3rd party service providers. Unisys is a company that comes to mind.
Although I’m generally satisfied with the Dell hardware I’ve had … their support has had it’s problems. There was the time that depot service technicien told me that the fan diagnostics lied. Another time I was getting kernel panics even after replacing the memory … they were willing to replace the motherboard on my PE 600SC on a one time customer satisfaction issue. I ended up calling back, got a different support rep who recognized the problem as a bad motherboard and setup a service call.
FWIW: I’ve almost always been disappointed with Dell’s consumer technical support division … and rarely been disappointed with their SMB technical support division.
My recommendation: Even if you are buying a computer for personal use, go through their SMB division.
I think XPS is a different support division from regular consumer support, isn’t it?