I Jumped Through Your Hoops, and Now you Need to do What?!?!
I took a late lunch yesterday, and by pure chance one of the technicians from Dell called. I happily answered the gentleman, and we got down to the nitty-gritty of troubleshooting my monitor (again). I attempted everything that was asked of me, gave honest answers about what was going on (which of course left the monitor blank in everything we did), and even offered a few suggestions of my own for things to try.The gentleman then put me on hold while he “looked up some more literature on my issue”. After coming back, I asked him if I could get the replacement sent, and he replied, “Apparently this is an issue, and I need to research it some more. I will call you back within 2 hours and we will get your replacement out.”
I think you see the irony when applied to my situation. Luckily this is not always the case for the majority of customers.
As I write this I am sitting 20 hours after that conversation, and I have yet to hear anything back from Dell. No phone call, no email, no nuthin. After taxes I paid $846 for this refurbished monitor. It was supposed to have gone through strict quality control to insure that it would be in proper working order, and had what I thought was a very generous and comprehensive warranty. Now after 3 days of wrangling with Dell, I still have a defective monitor with no positive resolution in sight.
Oddly enough, I did buy this LCD for a reason. There are some new products coming out shortly, and I wanted to get some high resolution testing done on them. This weekend was to be chock full of testing, but now I will have to cut some of my results down and make due with the monitors I currently have available to me. Yes, yes, cry me a river. But during tough economic times, I decided to make a large purchase from Dell. I was unlucky in that I received a product that failed shortly after I received it (as I type this on a system with a 23” HP LCD that is 5 years old). But though I was unlucky, I should still be covered by my warranty.
In Tough Times…
Yes, the economy stinks, and the tech side has taken a big hit. Unfortunately, while cuts must be made throughout a company, the primary goal should be to keep customers happy so that they will keep coming back and spending their money with a company. If a company alienates customers, then those are potential sales lost to them. When I first received the 3007WFP-HC, I was ecstatic. I was very pleased with how well the monitor performed, how even the backlighting was, and how clean the overall output was even without additional tweaking.
Now that the 30” LCD is a glorified paperweight, I am not so pleased. I am really not happy about having 3 days of hard work on my part to do everything Dell has asked of me to get a replacement. The frustration on my part is pretty high. When Dell advertises its “Award Winning Tech Support” on their commercials, they fail to mention those poor souls who have spent hours on the phone trying to get to the right support group, and who have waited days before getting any kind of resolution in place for their issues.
“An Award Winning Site” which mis-categorized my monitor’s status.
The likely outcome to this will be one of two things. I will get a call from someone higher up in Dell and my situation will be resolved, or I will not get any kind of resolution and I will request a refund. At that point I will take my refund (whenever that might show up) and likely attempt to scrape up some extra money and get the HP LP3065 for my high resolution testing. My previous experience with HP was with my LP2335 which has worked flawlessly for the past 4 years (I have owned it for 4 years, but it was manufactured in 2004).
I am not trying to burn any bridges with this company, but I think I would be remiss in not documenting my issues. This is definitely a case of buyer beware. Dell still has a good reputation, and I know for a fact that their server support is still unwavering. However, their other customers should not suffer. I spent a lot of money with Dell, and so far my buying experience has been less than pleasant. We can only hope that Dell will take this testimony in a positive light and make some good changes in their tech support department.
