I ordered a "Previously Ordered New" Dell Adamo 13 on 10/30/09 from the Dell Outlet Store, which basically means that it's a new computer, never been used by anyone else.

Speed ahead to today and a box comes from Dell. Inside is a Dell XPS One DESKTOP computer. Uh oh. I call Dell customer support and go through the usual phone tree and get transferred to three different departments, each one taking down information until I finally get to the department that deals with sending out replacements. The rep apologizes again for the mishap and says that they will send the replacement via overnight shipping from their warehouse within 18 business days.

WHAT!?!?!? I asked her if that was correct to which she responded, "Oh yes sir, we need to find a computer with the exact specifications with the one you ordered." When I asked what would happen if you didn't have the exact one in within that time, I didn't get a direct answer.

I paid more than $2,000 (if you include the accessories I bought in a separate order) for a Dell Adamo that I will not even get to touch for several more weeks. It doesn't seem fair to me. I thought the point of the Outlet store was that the computer is already made and therefore you can count on getting it quickly (and yes, at a discount... although for the one I ordered it wasn't THAT substantial)!

Maybe I should have just followed my friends and got a Mac instead...

Nooo! Anything but that!

Why should Rob have to wait up to a month for a replacement computer when it was Dell's fault that he received the wrong one? Maybe this is a case for Dell's Customer Advocates or even Michael Dell himself.

(Photo: thievingjoker)

To get the rebate, you'll have to confirm you were a New York state resident when you bought the computer, and fill out a form on the AG's website attesting to one of three problems: that you were misled by Dell about a "no interest" financing plan; that you bought a Dell service contract that promised "at home" or "on site" service; or that you were inappropriately denied or never received an expected rebate.

Cuomo Announces Dell Will Pay $4 Million For Defrauding New York Consumers [Office of Andrew Cuomo]
Information about filing a Claim for Compensation related to the Dell Settlement [NY Consumer Frauds Bureau]

The settlement comes after the New York Supreme Court upheld charges by Cuomo that Dell "engaged in fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices, and abusive debt collection practices" by, among other things, promoting "no interest" financing that later morphed into rates that went over 20%.

"Today's announcement is the final step in ensuring New Yorkers harmed by Dell's deceptive and illegal business practices are fully compensated," said Attorney General Cuomo. "Going forward, this deal means that Dell will have to clearly and fully disclose the terms and conditions of their products and services, to avoid this kind of fraud at the consumer's expense. My office is committed to ensuring a fair and honest marketplace across New York by rooting out these unlawful practices, and we encourage anyone who was ripped off by Dell to come forward and file a claim to get their money back."

New York customers who think they may be entitled to part of the $4 million have until December 15 to file a claim.

Cuomo Announces Dell Will Pay $4 Million For Defrauding New York Consumers [Office of Andrew Cuomo]
Information about filing a Claim for Compensation related to the Dell Settlement [NY Consumer Frauds Bureau]

(Photo: Brent and MariLynn)

Joseph writes:

I ordered a Dell Studio from Dell (My first mistake, I know). After I placed the order, where there were tons of helpful people eager to take my credit card number, I saw the Dell outlet center with some refurb laptops.

I called and cancelled my initial order, asked the lady on the phone (Name escapes me, but I KNOW they can find out who by my click to chat IDs) and asked her to compare, line for line, the two laptops. She assured me they were identical, component for component.

I then asked her about certified reburbs vs scratch and dent, which I did not want.

She says "Cert refurbs are conditioned to factory specification, the cases look just like a new laptop". I pointed her to the description online that hinted at some damage visible, she says "oh they just say that, I have never seen a refurb with any damage on it.

I place the order. It is a gift for my father in law.

I get the order.

It looks like a bear clawed the front of the cover. Someone took a flathead and gouged the bezel in the front. It is not line for line the same laptop, missing features, wrong OS, etc.

Best thing was the "present": a burnt .rar of Office 2007 corporate edition in the cd tray. It had a text file with the Warez site it was downloaded from as a reference. Yes folks, they sent me illegal software from a warez site. If this was refurb'd, where is the QA department? No one noticed a cd in the laptop?

I called corporate using Consumerist guidance, no help. I sent an email to corporate and CC'd Michael@dell.com, Got someone who honestly seemed to want to help me but "had hands tied"

Their compensation for a laptop that I cannot return (I was asking for a tech at least to come out and replace the case, drop off the OS I wanted, I was willing to eat the non-backlit keyboard) was this:

No restocking fee, return the laptop and get assistance ordering another.

I assure you, this was not "certified reburbished" but very much "scratch and severly dented".

I cannot return it as it was a gift to be presented in front of about 20 folks, one of them my future employer. The future is suddenly not so bright.

This worth a letter to BBB?

Thanks a lot Dell. Any advice from consumerist? Seems like Dell is considering this a "case closed".

Joseph doesn't need assistance ordering a new laptop. He needs is the laptop he ordered delivered at the price Dell quoted. They should provide a system of equal or greater value, free of charge. An apology note wouldn't hurt either.

B.J. writes:

Something you guys might find interesting:

Evidently, the EECB technique still works with some of our friends over at Dell. Let me explain. Back on December 8th, I called up Dell interested about placing an order for a new laptop for my upcoming college semester. I spoke to an excellent salesperson named Michael who graciously walked me through all of my options based on what I was looking for. Great, as this is what I was expecting and I wasn't let down. I ended up selecting the Dell XPS m1530 laptop in midnight blue. Seeing as I work in New York City and am also a student I needed something decently powerful that doesn't weigh a metric ton. Once we had wrapped up the call I was given an estimated ship date of 19, December. Since I am remarkably impatient once I actually decide to buy something (I'm kind of meticulous when it comes to purchases, not pain-in-the-ass meticulous but the be-sure-of-what-you're-buying kind) I prudently checked the status of the order.

Fast forward about a week and a half. The Wednesday before the 19th I decided to give Dell a call to see if there were any chance of the laptop being sent out earlier than its projected ship date. If there's one thing I USED to know about Dell, its that they're typically pretty good at beating their own deadlines. I was told to check back in the morning with a department called order modification, which resides in the warehouse and could provide me with a better answer.

*shrug* not a problem. I call back the following morning and to my astonishment I am informed that my order had been canceled. Canceled? WTF? I never canceled it? What the hell happened?!? Well, the sales associate, in her disconnected, I'm-only-here-for-the-paycheck way said flatly that there was an issue with credit processing. So here I sit, wondering if I went over my credit limit as I waited for somebody from Dell financial to get on the line. Finally, they inform me that as a new customer, they had to verify my information before the purchase went through. I asked them why now, and not when I ordered a week and a half ago. Nobody had answers. I clear up the block and was sent back to customer care to reinstate my order.

Ok, so here's where things get pharmaceutical...

Now, with most companies if there's a problem with an order they usually contact you, right? After all, they want your business as much as you want their product. No such luck here despite having all three of my phone numbers (home, cell, office) and two email addresses. Furthermore, even though this all happened ONE DAY before its ship date, Dell evidently cannot simply reinstate an order, even if is was their fault. Their resolution was to place an entirely new order for the same configuration as before, wait another two weeks or longer (due to holiday volume) and have a new estimated ship date of 23, Jan. And send that out to me next day comped. Hideously inadequate when you're talking about a previous order that was right on the cusp of completion when somebody on their end nozzed it up on me.

Order canceled late on the 17th. I just checked it earlier that afternoon. wow.

At this point I'm getting feisty because that makes no sense to me whatsoever. What the hell happened to my original order? Did they disassemble it overnight? Did it disappear like the Cheshire cat? The associate was actually trying to answer my rhetorical questions, how's that for sharp? I ask for a supervisor and get somebody who tells me that she's not a supervisor and that there are none in that building. After calling back 9 different times, speaking to six 'supervisors' being held for hours and dropped a few times for good measure I check out Consumerist. I'm pretty sure I'm glued to some unruly customer list because after about the third person I starting cussing people out something lovely.

I applaud the work you guys do, btw. They ways you deconstruct the corporate run-around is admirable. I'd love to work for you.

That said, on your site, I was looking for phone numbers to executive customer service and I happen upon the Michael@dell.com email address. By now, I'm thinking its a shot in the dark and if it doesn't work, I'll go to Sony or Apple the next day. I email my litany of woe and a way to reach me.

I should also mention that I paid a visit to Ihatedell.net and read the horror stories therein, had I read them earlier before I made the initial contact I probably wouldn't have gone here.

According to what I've read on your site, executive responses are often either surgically decisive or glacially slow. I was not expecting a prompt response. Suffice it to say that only maybe two hours later I have an email in my box from somebody at Dell's Global Escalation Management Team.

The epilogue is this:

After talking to the lady at the GEMT she hacked the new laptop's build and ship time from three weeks plus to two days and comped next-day shipping. This mess started on a Thursday and another laptop shipped on Monday. (Didn't get it till last Saturday thanks to FedEx's holiday bumbling, another story entirely) It arrived with upgraded components (higher processor, memory, backlit keyboard, screen) and with headphones and a personal letter of apology. Interestingly enough, despite dell's horrendous incompetence they still seem to get things done you just need to get to the right people. The company employs around 88,000. They can't all be assholes. Happy shopping.

By the by, the computer works great!

Lesson? M.Dell's personal email works. quickly and I would recommend it to anybody who gets stuck in this web.

Among the stops on my Dell Call Center World Tour:

Indonesia, Maylaysia, Ireland, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio and that old, outsourcing favorite, India.

B.J.

Photo:[Getty]

Elizabeth's story is just one of the many examples showing that piss-poor customer service can directly lead to lost business.

It has been over 3 weeks since I ordered a set of windows XP replacement cds, and still no sign of them. I ordered the disks using the form on dell.com and received an email saying that the disks would be sent to me in 3-5 business days. When I had not received the disks after over a week of waiting, I checked my account information on dell.com, hoping to find some answers. It was clear that the customer service rep never read the original form that I submitted and sent the disks to the "original shipping address" instead of the "current shipping address".

I replied to the original confirmation email (as the email told me to do if I had a problem) and explained the situation. I received what was obviously a form letter in reply saying that the situation would be corrected and that they would send out a new set of disks the following day. After waiting a few days for the "order info" to appear in my account information on dell.com, I was shocked to see that the disks had AGAIN been sent to the wrong address.

This time I tried calling customer service directly. After being on the phone for nearly an hour being transferred to a series of people whose English was barely intelligible , I was finally connected to a rep who said that because the package had not yet been picked up by DHL that he would personally contact DHL and change the shipping address on the package. He also stated that I would receive a confirmation email that same afternoon with the case number of my problem and all of the relevant shipping information.

By the next day I still had not received any confirmation email. My dell.com information still had the incorrect shipping address. Likewise using the DHL tracking number provided on the dell.com order info page, I saw that DHL still had the incorrect shipping address listed.

I called customer service again and was told that I had to be transferred to the technical support department to solve the problem. While I was on hold, the voice recording over the hold music told me to "have my credit card ready" so that technical support would be able to charge me for talking to them. I immediately hung up when I heard this. There was no way that I was now going to pay to talk to technical support about a shipping issue for a supposedly free set of disks.

I called customer service back immediately and was connected to a different representative who said that he would indeed be able to help me. He pulled up my file and said that he saw I had called the previous day and that the agent I had spoken to had contacted DHL and had changed the shipping address. The representative was quite rude and treated me like I was crazy for calling to confirm what I had been told the previous day. When I asked why I had not received a confirmation email about this (as the rep the previous day had promised), I was told that between Friday afternoon and Saturday afternoon Dell had changed their policy and that they were not allowed to email me a copy of my case number and complaint information nor could they even tell me the case number over the phone. I was however promised by this rep that the disks would arrive on Tuesday.

Tuesday came and no disks. I received an email stating that my order had been "resolved and closed" because the package had been delivered. Magically, they now included the case number in the email, the case number that on Saturday I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed to know due to their "policy". The Dell representatives had blatantly lied to me.

I checked the DHL.com tracking information. The disks had been delivered alright...AGAIN at the incorrect address. I called DHL directly and asked them if they had ever received any request from Dell to change my shipping information. Of course, they had not. The Dell representatives had blatantly lied to me about this as well.

I called customer service for a third time and explained the entire situation again. I told the rep that I had just gotten off the phone with DHL and that even though her computer said that Dell had contacted them about the shipping change, DHL had no knowledge of this. All she could tell me was that because the order had technically been delivered, the only way to receive the disks was to start the request process from scratch. I did so. So here I am Friday, sitting here still waiting for the disks to arrive knowing that some poor soul at my old college dorm has now received two sets of windows XP disks and is probably wondering what the heck is going on.

There is currently no information regarding this third order on my dell.com account info page. At this point, I just want to see if Dell will EVER be able to send the disks to me. Thank goodness all I had ordered were a set of free disks, imagine if this had been done with a full computer system.

This was not my first horror story with Dell customer service, but it will certainly be my last. I am currently typing this on my shiny MacBook. The final selling point for me was that there is a physical Apple store nearby that's open 24/7 - 365 days a year with customer service reps that I can look in the eye. Then if they lie to me, at least they have to do it to my face. ;)

Welcome, Elizabeth, to a new, better world.

(Photo: Getty)

I am a faithful - *religiously* devoted - reader of your blog (but not in a creepy way), and a huge supporter of your customer-focused stance. I've emailed your articles to friends, family members and strangers.

Unfortunately, I'm writing you today with my own customer service nightmare. I'd like to call it: (cue ominous music)

DELL MAKES PROMISES IT CAN'T KEEP, CHEATS CUSTOMER OUT OF $70, CHASES SAID CUSTOMER INTO THE ARMS OF STEVE JOBS

(Okay, that's not very punchy... but Dell cheated me out of 70 bucks, and I'm too mad to make a snappy title)

So here's the SHORT VERSION:

I'm a Mac and PC user, and recently had to buy a new computer. Solely based on price, I decided to buy a Dell on 01/31/08 - it was on sale, and they had a nifty promotion for a $70 gift card to be mailed to you with your purchase. (I think you can guess what the problem is going to be...)

It's been 3 and a half months, and I NEVER GOT that $70 gift card. I called their customer service three times:

#1 03/30/08: Spoke to a supervisor, who asked me to PROVE THAT I QUALIFIED for the gift card. I forwarded him my confirmation email (with the gift card listed in the order), and he said he'd have a supervisor call me back, no one called me back

#2 around 04/15/08: Spoke to "Anne" who said she'd have a supervisor call me back, hung up on me, no one called me back

#3 05/05/08: Spoke to nameless CSR who said that all the $70 gift cards were all sent out and if I hadn't received one - TOO BAD - they were all out. Nothing she could do. I asked to speak to a supervisor, she refused to connect me, said he'd call me back, no one called me back

During the three calls, the CSRs were rude, obstinate, uninformed and, of course, unhelpful. Can I mention again that each time a CSR promised that someone would call me back, and I have yet to receive a phone call from anyone at Dell?

So... Now I'm at the point where I am being a good Consumerist reader and sending Dell an EECB. And I want to share my story with you - considering, also, that I must not be the only one Dell cheated out of the promotion. I mean, we all know how horrible their customer service is - but I didn't know that they blatantly lied to their customers to boot. BUY A MAC!

Julia wrote back today to tell us that her EECB has been ignored and she's heard nothing back from Dell. Is she the only one who is having this problem?

Any advice for Julia? She could report Dell to her state's attorney general for not living up to their advertised agreement. What do you think?

(Photo: Ben Popken )

UPDATE:

I have an update on my case - Dell will be issuing me a credit of $70 back to my credit card. (!)

I actually had two interactions with Dell, seemingly unrelated:

Geoff [Ed.— He's a helpful Dell guy who reads the blog.] got back to me, and told me he would be taking care of my issue

Before he could do that, a woman named Anne called me me from their "Customer Resolutions Center". She was the one who promised me that she would be crediting my acct., and that she will follow up Mon. or Tues. It seems that she was following up on my EECB, as she and Geoff did not know anything about each other.

Anyway... Yay for Consumerist and the mighty EECB!

The EECB is magical, is it not?

When DELL failed to show in court, Pat Dori, of Hackensack won $3000 by default. A ruling allowed court employees to close the kiosk and confiscate equipment if the judgment was not paid.

Dell settled out-of-court with Mr. Dori under an undisclosed arrangement.

The victory came after five-months and 19 phone calls to Dell after Dori's laptop fan broke. When he turned it in for repairs, Dell lost his laptop and returned just his hard drive. To compensate, Dell offered a refrubed laptop without an extended warranty.

"My big issue was, they never wanted to talk to me, never wanted to hear me,'' said Dori. "The little guy found a way to hit them in the head with a rock. You get their money, you get their attention. God only knows how much their legal team cost them.''

— BEN POPKEN

NJ Man's Lawsuit Against Dell Settled [1010 Wins] (Thanks to Stefan!)

At The Consumerist, we're always happy to bring a shaft of sunshine into our reader's lives. After reading about the Dell discount offers we posted about, WebKatz went ahead and got news PCs, including the fancy schmancy XPS desktop.

His letter reveals what happens when you have a "Customer Relations Rep" call whose motive is more insidious and ulterior then calling to see how everything's going.

Upselling only works if the customer is in fact satisfied with the product to begin with.

"Your whatzit doesn't work."
"Well, have you considered getting two whatzits?"

This happened to us, too after we bought a Dell XPS laptop. A few days later a rep called to "check in" and we soon found ourselves answering questions about how many servers we would like to buy. Bad Dell, bad. Trust erosion.

Basically, we agree with Jarvis. Surprise! Also, we just came.

I don t think I influenced a thing. ... I was merely a leading indicator of the problems that had built up in Dell s customer base with its unreliable products and unsatisfying service. I could have put my story out there and no one could have responded. Instead, hundreds responded. When you saw that, folks, you should have sold your Dell stock. Fast.

Read the 'study' yourself, if you like. We could make head nor tails of it. It seems that blogs do things.

Onalytica: Measuring Blogger Influence [Onalytica (PDF)]