Mon. Dec. 18, 2006
With the busy holiday season upon us, I thought it important to take the time to write this to share a few tips on how to get the most from your experience with Dell, whether that be a purchase experience, product use experience, or support experience. We’ve worked hard this year to make improvements to bring you the best possible customer experience.
First of all, for those who have just placed an order and have questions about it, you have a few options. Regardless of what your question is or which option you choose, you’ll want to have either your order number or customer number handy. You’ll find both numbers in your email order confirmation. The fastest way for you to find out when your order will ship is to check it online. We’ve tightened up our manufacturing processes and built new tools to ensure that the information you see online really does reflect what’s happening in the factories. Other options for help with your order are chat, email or call one of our customer service agents. And again, be sure to have your order or customer number ready to get the fastest service.
So you’ve unpacked the computer, now what? Our XPS, Inspiron and Dimension design teams have introduced or improved a set of support tools this year. First, you’ll want to get familiar with Dell Support. This nifty utility runs quietly in the background, enabling real-time health scans of your PC, peripherals and network devices. It provides proactive alerts, automated "fixes,” software updates and relevant self-support information -- all designed to help keep your system in optimal working order. Because networking assistance was one of the most frequent reasons customers called us, we introduced Network Assistant this year to help you set up, monitor, troubleshoot and repair your PC’s network connection, as well as assist with the management of other devices connected to your network. Every system comes loaded with a 90-day trial of the upgraded version of Network Assistant so be sure to check it out. After the trial period, you can continue using the free, basic version or purchase the upgrade.
If you need to contact Dell for a technical support issue, have your service tag number handy. If you’re not sure what that is or where to find it you’ll find helpful information on our web site. Our hardware warranty support and Dell On Call teams are standing by 24/7 to provide you with the best possible service. Our newest support tool – DellConnect – has helped simplify the support process in a lot of ways. DellConnect is a simple, online access tool that allows a Dell agent to access your computer through a broadband connection, diagnose your problem and repair it—all under your supervision.
If you have the need to return a product, please check out the return information available on our Web site. We realize that we’ve not done a great job in processing returns in the past, but our teams around the world have implemented changes throughout the year to make this work more smoothly. In fact, in the US we have reduced the processing time for refunds by about 2 weeks for returns managed by UPS. Typically, this means you will get your refund in about a week. Please bear in mind this is only with UPS and not other shipping companies.
Now for a few tips on how to reach us by phone. Our Sales, Customer Service and Tech Support teams all have specific phone numbers which can most easily be found by going to www.dell.com/contactus. These links are specific to the U.S. market. Customers in other regions can choose the approriate country/ region after going to Dell.com, then choose Contact Us near the bottom of the home page to get appropriate contact information for their region. Customer Service teams handle issues from the time you place your order to the time you receive it; Tech Support handles technical problems. Randomly calling any number will generally result in a transfer. Once you receive your product, using the contact numbers provided in the documentation/instructions shipped with your product will be the best numbers to contact us.
If you do need to place a call, we’ve tried to make our phone menus easier to navigate. Our phone menus are built to recognize the customer number, order number or Express Service Code number you provide while in the phone menu system and will automatically route your call to minimize the time you spend in a menu. For those of you that can’t locate any of these numbers, our phone menus are also designed to ask general questions that will ultimately get you to the right destination but it may take several questions to get there. Just stay with it and be prepared to answer the questions as best you can. Regarding the phone system, I know it’s a complex topic—I’ll see if I can get someone from that team to write a blog entry soon that focuses on more specifics.
And finally, if you have already contacted us for support and do not feel your issue has been resolved, click on the Unresolved Issue link at the bottom of every page on www.dell.com. This will take you to a page where you’ll choose the type of support you need -- either Customer Service or Technical Support -- and then click again to get to the appropriate form. The completed forms go directly to teams of trained, specialized escalations agents. The only requirement to use this is that you must enter the case number assigned to you on your first contact.
We’ll continue to focus on new improvements to help customers and this won't stop with the new year. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season and the best possible experience doing business with Dell.