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Dell Monitor: Epilogue
18 years ago
General
A couple months ago some might recall that I was pretty pissed off that my nice hi-res widescreen Dell monitor started doing all sorts of weird things. I was pretty mad that I was stuck with this lemon, and not happy with the ‘well, you’re out of luck’ response I got from tech support when I called.
A lot of folks chimed in with how bad Dell was. I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic with trashing them because past dealings had been positive, but I wasn’t going to defend ‘em either.
Now, let me tell you what happened later on.
After complaining in a few semi-public places like this (certainly nothing bigger than FA), someone that works for Dell saw what had happened and decided, on their own, to look into it. It just didn’t seem right to them, and they liked helping people solve problems in their job. And, It turned out it wasn’t right. They went out of their way to see that indeed I could get the monitor replaced.
So, you know what? I really think that reflects extremely well on that person, and pretty well on the company. But you know, I want to say something else here. We really have to watch it when we trash a whole company sometimes. In any of them there are pockets of people that are dedicated and really mean well and want to do a good job. When they do, they have to be thanked. Because if you don’t do something to make sure these people get compliments, and hopefully promoted, well, what’s to stop assholes working their way up the company ladder huh? The first person I talked with, well, I wish I’d written their name down, because they were a jerk. But I DO have the name of the person that went out of their way to help me, and I’ll be making sure their superiors know that they really were there for me.
Every company will churn out some lemons. Now if its an established pattern, then you have to watch it. Its what they do to fix it, or what they don’t do, that can often be the big difference.
So, thank you Dell, and thank you to the person that really cares about what it is they do. Because of you I can easily read what it is I'm typing tonight. :)
A lot of folks chimed in with how bad Dell was. I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic with trashing them because past dealings had been positive, but I wasn’t going to defend ‘em either.
Now, let me tell you what happened later on.
After complaining in a few semi-public places like this (certainly nothing bigger than FA), someone that works for Dell saw what had happened and decided, on their own, to look into it. It just didn’t seem right to them, and they liked helping people solve problems in their job. And, It turned out it wasn’t right. They went out of their way to see that indeed I could get the monitor replaced.
So, you know what? I really think that reflects extremely well on that person, and pretty well on the company. But you know, I want to say something else here. We really have to watch it when we trash a whole company sometimes. In any of them there are pockets of people that are dedicated and really mean well and want to do a good job. When they do, they have to be thanked. Because if you don’t do something to make sure these people get compliments, and hopefully promoted, well, what’s to stop assholes working their way up the company ladder huh? The first person I talked with, well, I wish I’d written their name down, because they were a jerk. But I DO have the name of the person that went out of their way to help me, and I’ll be making sure their superiors know that they really were there for me.
Every company will churn out some lemons. Now if its an established pattern, then you have to watch it. Its what they do to fix it, or what they don’t do, that can often be the big difference.
So, thank you Dell, and thank you to the person that really cares about what it is they do. Because of you I can easily read what it is I'm typing tonight. :)
Congratulations, you've just had a run in with a rare breed in the business world: someone that actually cares about the customer and about their responsibility to support the company's products!
Sarcasm aside, I find that most people you work with in a "customer service" setting are helpful and nice in direct proportion to the amount of respect and politeness that you give them. Thus, if you make yourself a customer that's easy to work with, you tend to find that a lot of people will do what they can to help. Naturally, some will do more than others. It sounds to me like you got particularly lucky this time.