Dell Laptop - Good Customer Service

[djhampson]

On Tuesday night I switched on my Dell Inspiron 9300 Laptop and was rewarded with a blank screen. My first thought that the Windows 7 Beta I had just installed probably died but no amount of button pushing would get the screen on, even during boot up. Thankfully an external monitor would work so I gave up and contacted Dell.

Went to their website, entered my service tag, which told me I had 44 days left of my 3 year warranty (good timing!). Filled in 1 simple form about the problem and was told via email that they would contact me next business day. Got a phone call yesterday morning from a call centre in India. They asked a few sensible questions to confirm the problem was with the LCD screen and said a technician would come around to my workplace.

Today, Technician turned up on time and had a new LCD screen fitted in about 30 minutes. When the tech pulled the old screen out we could see that the flex cable that goes from the GFX card to the LCD screen around the hinge had worn on one side which probably caused the problem. Added bonus the tech was a Landy fan and talked to me for about 10 minutes about my Freebie.

I'm mightily impressed with Dell right now. As far as I can remember I didn't purchase an extended warranty or a high priority warranty yet my lappy was fixed in a few days and at no trouble to me.

The guy on the phone was from a call centre but he had enough knowledge to recognize that I'm not a dumb user so I didn't have to go thru 100 questions (Do you have it plugged in? have you restarted etc).

When it died I thought I was up for a new screen and would need to send the lappy away and that I would be without it for weeks. OR I was going to be left with a compact desktop PC \ donor laptop for a Car PC. I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong.

[PaulP38a]

Hi dj - I concur with your experience and give Dell a big thumbs up for customer service.

A couple of years ago I was the IT director for a federal govt taskforce doing a series of international summits around the country with a heavy reliance on IT. In our fleet we had a significant number of Dell and HP machines (servers, desktops, laptops, storage area networks etc). On the rare occassion that any of this equipment failed, Dell were extremely responsive.

I recall that we were setting up one of the summits in Adelaide early one morning and a server motherboard failed. Dell were onsite before lunchtime and had the server up and running again.

On another occassion, one of our delegates spilled a cup of coffee on to a laptop keyboard during a summit at the Hyatt Coolum and Dell had it fixed onsite the next day. In Coolum! Much better than expected.

By comparison, HP rarely met the expected response timeframe. As an ex-employee of HP (who left on good terms) this is a bit embarrassing.

When my personal HP laptop failed last year, and within it's warranty period, I was without it for a couple of weeks while it was sent to Sydney (so the agent says) to be repaired.

A friend of mine who's Dell laptop recently failed got no help from Dell at all because her warranty had expired. To be expected I suppose - other vendors would be the same.

My next laptop? Unlikely to be a HP, very likely to be a Dell.

Cheers, Paul.

[discowhite]

im in the other boat! they have been quick to replace parts in my latitude D820 yes, but for the first 2 weeks of owning this computer they had it for 14 days! they replaced everyting except the screen and case! 2 years later im still having troubles, seams it likes re sizing the screen all by its self, stalls and hangs frequently... and last week....3 blue screens of death....all signs pointed to dead RAm and or HDD! dell claim it was a software confliction......and the only way to fix it is to wipe it and re install the opperating system!:mad: that has been done to my laptop 6 times!!!!!! WTF!!!! there is a history on dell's data base a mile long....

and no i wont ever recomend dell and i will never buy another one....

cheers phil

[Bytemrk]

Geez Phil,

Sounds like you got the friday arvo build :(

I've currently got a Dell Precision 4300, my last laptop was a Latitude D820 and both have been excellent.

We also have around 70 - 80 Latitudes at work and except for a few batteries dying 10 minutes out side of warranty, I'd be surprised if we've had more that 4-5 service calls total in the last 3 years.

They get treated pretty hard at work, but they just keep ticking.
I even managed to bounce my Latitude on a concrete floor :oops2:
It slipped off a bench in its bag and landed on the corner of the screen. It hit the ground hard enough to put a small hole in my backpack bag :eek::eek: .... yet it kept working perfectly and still is 2 years later. (Got to love that titanium chassis)

From my experiences.. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend a commercial Dell.

And as far as customer service goes,they have replaced several batteries for us well outside the 12 month battery warranty, at no cost. So pretty happy there too.

Cheers, Mark

[HangOver]

Dell also thumbs up from me too I own one and have quite a few at work that I support in five years I think I called them out once and had a harddrive express couriered as replacment once. Not a bad record.

I find Dell's sales department next to useless they really dont know what they are talking about half the time but the support is excellent. If you want it even better pay a bit more for the gold(priority) support, 24x7 support and I think for laptops its next working day replacment for parts.