Dell Impressed the Hell Out of Me Today

Me so happy. The motherboard on my Dell desktop computer got replaced this afternoon. As a total non-geek, I can assure you that a motherboard is a very important thing. And I have to say, after 40 hours in Dell Hell, I understand the issues that Dell faces a lot better.

I pissed and moaned about my problem enough that I got "escalated" to a senior honcho who literally took over the process. He made sure:
-- I really got next day service,
-- that a senior tech came to fix my computer
-- the part got shipped and that it arrived.

He came in two hours early this morning to be sure that everrything came together.He told me Dell was prepared to replace the computer if it didn't work after the repair.

Nonetheless, the tech, Bobby, who actually fixed the computer (and even took the time to pet Benny Bix Ochman Labradoodle puppy) said Dell should have sent a CPU and memory, just in case those also needed to be replaced.

There was a scary moment with a blue screen about the hard drive, but it had to do with getting the same settings on the new motherboard as on the old, and they worked through the problem. Now my computer is working.

BUT, obviously, neither Dell nor any other company can assign every customer two senior level people to fix their computer. The real problem seems to be in the diagnostics, and the level of training for each support tech. It's a hell of a challenge and I have to wonder whether there could ever be a way to make the process work perfectly.

No matter what, Dell did a hell of a job for me today.

And I learned that when you turn on your Dell, you need to watch the screen instead of walking away while it boots up. Because the hard drive is actually smart enough to tell you to back up because it's going to die. Holy camoley!

I'm totally paranoid about my data. I back it up onto a Maxtor One Touch hard drive, and onto DVDs. I have the same data on my laptop. But I got lazy, and my most recent backups were two weeks old. My backups are going to always be up to date from now on. That was too close a call.

BL, I wrote about Mozy, a"lifesaver" backup service, and I really mean it - sign up and never worry about your data again:-)

Dell's trying to meet expectations and seems to be moving the needle, I had a similar good experience and posted about it a couple of weeks back I was so pleased. Link to: http://www.keithmcollins.com/2006/08/beating-customer-expectations.html