Love/hate

Lately, I have had a love/hate relationship with Dell’s customer service. I love the fact that they act very fast when shipping an item to you and they never quibble about the cost of a replacement part. And I hate the fact that I have to try so very hard to understand the people who staff their Help Desk. These are very bright people and I have often been surprised at the depth of knowledge they have about all of the Dell products. But we don’t speak the same language. They are located somewhere in Bangalore, India and have been trained to understand American idiom, but we, the customers, have had no training in how to understand them.

So it was with great anxiety that I approached the task of securing a new hard drive for Laurae’s laptop. It was still under warranty so I knew that I wouldn’t have to argue about the replacement cost, but I was still faced with the fact that I would have to endure a few hours of phone time with someone who was going to try my patience.

Then I remembered that with Dell, you could bypass the phone lines. They offer e-mail technical service. A software program “reads” your e-mail and determines what it thinks is your problem. If you agree, a technician is assigned to your case and the e-mails begin to flow. It took about 12 hours, but part of that was because I go to bed at 10 and the technician was having his first cup of coffee in the morning, somewhere in India. The best part is the fact that the language/idiom barrier was gone. We typed away with never a thought of not being understood.

OK. I have a new hard drive coming and when it arrives, that is when the real work begins. I will have to re-install all of those Microsoft programs with their complex “key” codes. And then I will have to explain to Microsoft that I’m just re-installing, not stealing. What a chore!

By the way; I did have a backup of sorts. I had copied all of Laurae’s documents to our shared Iomega drive…so she only lost about a weeks worth of documents. Not many at all. But, in the future I will mirror her drive onto an Iomega drive of her own.