Dell complaints

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

What if you were given a blank check with which to 'fix' Tech Support and Customer Service? So that it worked 'perfectly'. What would you do?

Bearing in mind it's still a business, costs have to be accounted for, you can't 'just throw money at it', you actually have to make it work, applying practical organization skills, much the same as those applied in manufacturing (Dell largely sets the benchmark there, why not in TS/CS???).

Not necessarily in any order:

*) Hire and keep good people.
) Churning staff is hugely wasteful. This is simple common sense. The entire resource outlay to churn staff produces precisely NOTHING in terms of performance; NO calls answered, NO problems solved, NO customer satisfied. How obvious do things have to be???
) The job is stressful and fatiguing, "performance" cannot be maintained under these conditions. It's like driving your car as fast as it will go all the time, it won't run very long before it craters. For every 90 minutes on the phone, these people should get 10 minutes to get up, walk around, smoke, pray, whatever.
) Proactively build staff technical knowledge. That's the CORE of performance. When the customer reaches a genuinely knowledgeable person he immediately feels better. When one call solves his problem, his confidence in the purchase and in the brand SOARS. There is online training material explaining 'how to remove the HDD in a Phrizbee', but NOTHING explaining WHEN to replace a HDD.

*) Reset metrics. The performance metrics for TS/CS should measure what they are there to accomplish-- expeditiously restore the customer's hardware AND satisfaction in the brand.
) Implement a 5x5-matrix Customer Satisfaction Survey, emailed or online at the customer's discretion. NO MORE than 5 issues, don't waste their time or they won't participate. The results of this survey should be the PRIMARY performance metric for TS/CS. 'Number of calls' is nice to know, but that just tells you how many problems you HAVE, not whether ANY of them are getting resolved.

*) HIRE ENOUGH PEOPLE. Could the manufacturing floor sustain 30-45 minute delays waiting for kits to arrive? No, productivity would collapse. Yet this MBA-driven obsession with zero-head-count expects the customer to sustain 30-45 minute delays in their productivity.
) Create a 'tiger team' (sorry for the corny management buzzphrase) of experts, to whom any call which has gone unanswered for 10 minutes is directed. The 12-minute metric should apply to the customer's time not the tech's time. Customers start out marginally coherent in discussing computer hardware; after waiting 45 minutes they're not likely to be coherent at all. From that starting point, the whole transaction is impeded, and even if TS/CS genuinely solves their problem in 45 seconds, they're still not going to recall the interaction with Dell favorably.

*) Bulldoze the entire diagnostic tree and start over. It's rubbish. Like a road that's been patched so many times it's all patches.
) It was developed with the best of intentions by people who really knew what they were talking about at the time, but without regard for how it was to be applied. That is, it was written in convoluted engineering detail, and it's applied by people who can barely define the terms much less the working relationship between them.
) It produces erroneous results AT LEAST 40% of the time. A document-set such as this must be proactively maintained, with timely adjustments made to account for issues as they arise, and subject to performance metrics such as 'success rate'. If this is not done, the documentation quickly becomes stale. You can get nearly the same success rate as the current system provides by using a dartboard.

That's enough for now, I don't want to go over my own "5-issue" rule. Would these help? What else would?
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[ShaftDu]

if I had a blank check, I would spend on it someone who can come up with a better marketing appoarch. Instead of focusing on bottem of the barrel crap, lets focus on putting out a better product.

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

The marketing is geared to what motivates the 'center of the bellcurve' demographic to purchase... or more precisely, to call or go online where they can be 'upsold'. The ethics of doing that are on the level of car dealers, consistently defined by consumers as 'in the bottom three trustworthy retailers'. The strategy is successful enough to be irresistable to mass marketers. I'd love to see a successful mass marketer do so with 'ultimate' ethics rather than those we've come to accept. That would be progress. But the competitive nature of the commodity marketplace gravitates everyone toward the lowest ethical common denominator.

The product is sound. Dell is consistently in the top 4 in unbiased customer-reliability surveys. Those surveys do not take individual platforms into account, but average them all together by brand. Some platforms have had 'characteristic' issues, and some handling of those issues has been less-than-satisfactory to some customers. The same is true of General Motors and Sony and...

Product integrity at Dell is very good. That doesn't mean you can't get a 'lemon'. The process needs to be continually audited. And to an extent, it is. There's always room for improvement.

Umm, but this is the "Improve Tech Support" thread. Comments along those lines?
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[ShaftDu]

actually Rock,

that would go hand and hand. If you focus on the lowest domination then try to upsell. You have to cut cost in doing so. Hence, the reason why Dell has 90 day warranties.

I think service should be package in with the product hence they would be helping the overall product. Right now, computers are just look like it was a toaster oven and not the family car.

[Grissom]

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

[Badger]

Rocke: What you say pretty much sums up fixing everything that Dell is doing now. It doesn't really inspire any new ideas to help improve it though. While fixing the problems you have now, it would end up as the "broken road" analogy you used to tech tree. What you have to do is have a totally new customer experience.

First off, instead of a PBX voice mail message, have someone on the phone after it rings. Their job is to route the call. Metric < 30 seconds. That way the call is properly routed; no more fuckups on the customers part by entering in the wrong digits, or problems with the PBX routing.

Call heads to tech support. It's broken down into one of three catagories: hardware support, software support, reinstall procedures. Each of these catagories has people who have a specific knack for them, as ascertained through management screening and periodic testing. The calls still come in randomly, and the tech has the option of taking them, but if they feel that it's best put into someone else's cue, then have it rerouted. That way, if the tech is not comfortable or not knowledgable for a certain aspect of computer training, they do not attempt to fix it. Someone with expertise fixes it. Or it could be structured as a tree: you start in reinstalls until you can pass various software issue tests and can be promoted. Likewise from software to hardware. Each catagory has its own personal metrics to adhere too, with reinstalls having the loosest.

Mentors would be minimal. I still prefer the "walk up and ask" approach. It saves time in the long run, and a good tech isn't wasted. Mentors would be one up from hardware on the tree, or someone who has mastered all three catagories testwise.

Managements role would simply be to make sure the employees are adhereing to their metrics, assist people who are having difficulty by offering tutoring and working with them, and dealing with irate customers. Call monitoring would be outsourced, but could still be done within for purposes of helping techs in need of assistance with metrics.

That's my two cents.
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I may not agree with what you say, but I will fight for your right to say it.

Midget Tossing funds Terrorism

[WexCan]

[Blaze]

Ooops ! Went wayyyyyy over 5 !

Hire real teachers from a vo-tech and put them in training.

Hire Scott Adams as replacement for Kevin Rollins.

Give employees computers and other Dell products as incentives for performance.

Immediately terminate any employee, manager or rep, who acts in some decidedly rude way to the customer.

One number for each Company number.