Customer Experience – all talk?

These days, we hear a lot about organisations ‘getting’ what a good customer experience is all about, and pulling out all stops to provide it via all kinds of means from context-aware communications to rich, interactive web experiences. We read a lot about lead management and nourishment, where every potential prospect is as precious as a small diamond.

And then reality smacks you in the face and shows you that some companies still don’t get it, despite all the talk on Twitter and Facebook. Worse, companies who once got it, can lose it in a big way. We buy quite a bit of PC gear for Technoledge, and the time had come to buy a new laptop. Dell had the most attractive deal on a Vostro 3400, which I configured online and ordered by phone from a sales rep in Malaysia because I also wanted to order a 24” screen which sat in different silo on the website. 

That was the first glitch: If you’re in the small business silo, you can’t add a product from Dell’s consumer line. The next problem was that no order acknowledgement arrived, even though the sales rep had my address. My pleas late that day and the following day (by email and phone) went unanswered, and this got to me after 24 hours.

Anything you order online these days from anywhere produces an instant acknowledgement by email, but not Dell. They have our credit card details, and we have nothing, not even an order number. So when I called Dell to try and track down what is going on, I’m shunted from one phone ‘reception’ to another like an unwelcome visitor. Eventually I end up being pointed back to the same sales rep who refuses to talk to me. Needless to say, she’s on the phone.

There’s no way that I can see of getting through to Dell Australia who claims to have an office at French’s Forest in Sydney, not on the company website and not in the white pages. Every phone number lands you in the far east, where Dell’s agents are very polite but very useless.

In desperation, I find a place on the Dell website where I can report a problem with my order. I do that, and just to add insult to injury, there is no acknowledgement that the submission of my problem report was successful. The screen twitches but doesn’t change.

We have developed conventions after many years of internet use, but it seems Dell has forgotten them along with customer care in the true sense. 

Kim