In Plain English : Dell Says 'Good Support' Is Not Free

-
The days of 'Free' Customer service looks to be over. At least a quality customer service is. This comes to me (and I am sure for most of you) as a big surprise, but I guess we all have to get used to this.

Occasionally, "we've heard from customers that it's hard to understand a particular accent and that they couldn't understand the instructions they were getting," said Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman.

So, Dell introduced a Support Service called as 'Your Tech Team' Service, that promises that Technical Experts are from North America (instead of Bangalore, India for instance) and average wait time would be less than 2 minutes.

Sounds Great, finally Dell heard the Customers. Not quite. This service is not for every Dell customer that purchases a Dell product, but only for those who pay an additional $12.95 a month to receive this 'premium' service.

And Dell Spokesman put a PR spin to this 'Pay if You need Good Customer Support' service,

"This illustrates Dell's commitment to customer choice." -Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman

In Plain English, Dell is saying 'Good Customer Support' is not Free and if you need a Customer Support that you can understand (ie., accent free), you must pay $12.95 a month.

If Dell really understand customers that they have difficultly in understanding instructions by its Global (ie., outsourced) support team, why not replace it with a better customer support that is local, for free.

Source: The Bangalore Backlash: Call Centers Return to U.S



After thinking for a while, I guess, I am already getting used to this new idea. If a company promises a quick (like Dell promising within 2 minutes) response and provide me a customized service for me, I guess I am ready to pay for it. I am not thrilled by a NA associate to responding to my call, as I can understand lots of accentuated instructions, and also I felt some times, that NA associates aren't any better (they are much worse in many cases). Job hopping is a normality in NA and I don't expect any better service from an NA associate if they haven't worked in that particular job for some good time. And on average, most doesn't spend any good time on any job. So it goes without saying what we can expect of them. And it is equally difficult to find a person to be in NA and doesn't have an accent anyways.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Newsworthy News in Red October : Dow Jones & Tax Dodgers

-
Dow Jones Index crosses the symbolic 10000 figure. U.S. stocks rallied, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average above 10,000 for the first time in a year, on better-than-estimated earnings at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Intel Corp. Bank of America Corp., American Express Co. and JPMorgan more than doubled since the Dow slid to a 12-year low on March 9 as global financial firms began recovering from $1.6 trillion in writedowns and credit losses. International Business Machines Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. jumped at least 54 percent since March 9 on signs the nation was recovering from the worst recession in seven decades. Source: Bloomberg And, about 7500 International Tax dodgers file for IRS Amnesty to avoid jail Some 7,500 international tax dodgers have applied for an amnesty program that promises no jail time and reduced penalties for tax cheats who come forward, the Internal Revenue Service announced Wednesday. … The program is part of a larger eff...
Read more

USCIS Selects Final H1B Petitions by Random Selection - Almost a 50% chance for each Application

-
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced today that on April 12 it conducted the computer-generated random selection process to determine which H-1B petitions, subject to the congressionally mandated H-1B cap for fiscal year 2008 (FY 2008), would continue to final processing. USCIS completed this determination ahead of the preliminary schedule noted on April 3, when it announced it had received enough petitions to meet the cap for FY 2008. The 123,480 cap-subject petitions received on April 2 and 3 were labeled with unique numerical identifiers and selected randomly by computer. The chosen numerical identifiers were then transmitted to the appropriate service center for further processing. Source: USCIS Announcement Number 123,480 looks a lot better keeping in view initial estimates. A good 50% chance for each application to be selected.  Update: 3rd May 2007 Hello friends, I understand your anxiety. But don’t loose your hope and/or temper yet. Please wai...
Read more

H1B 2008:USCIS released Preliminary Numbers

-
USCIS today released the final count of number of unique pieces of mail received for H1B petitions. It received 133,000 unique pieces of mail containing H-1B petitions. I guess, each piece of mail will ' mostly ' contain more than one petition, as no company would send each petition in a seperate package and its most unlikely that a firm applies for just one petition. Probably by the end of next week, we might know the actual number of H1B petitions filed and how lucky one must be to get through the initial filter. Source: USCIS Releases Preliminary Number of FY 2008 H-1B Cap Filings  (26KB PDF) 04/05/2007 During Monday and Tuesday, USCIS received 133,000 unique pieces of mail containing H-1B petitions. This is lower that the original USCIS estimate of 150,000. USCIS based the initial estimate on amounts from manifests received along with the mail. USCIS reached the updated number following a physical count of the mail. Each piece of mail may contain more than one H-1B pe...
Read more