Customer Experience

• Listening to what our customers say about Dell Chat

  Fri. Oct. 10, 2008
  by Debbie Davenport, Project Senior Consultant

  Over the last two weeks, I’ve shared information about How to Chat When Your System is Feeling Under the Weather and Where in the World is Dell Chat? Today, I wanted to share some insight about Chat Support from our customers.

  With nearly three years experience in offering Chat support to our customers, we’re still listening to what our customers really like and what they would like improved. Here are some lessons learned:

  We often see comments about ‘speed’, and ‘ease’ of Chat support. A click of a Chat icon, enter your service tag and voila’ you’re magically transported to the right support team. We get kudos about the ease of access to chat and about agents being concise and to the point. On the flip-side we lose points with our customers when the agent doesn’t respond quickly. This year, we added an indicator to let our customers see, “the agent is typing” in an effort to make the agent work activity on the other side of the chat interaction more transparent.

  It’s common when troubleshooting a system to have the customer power down and re-start the system. If you are chatting on the same system you’re troubleshooting, a system re-start will naturally disconnect your Chat. While we’ve almost always had the capability to resume the Chat session with the same agent after a planned disconnect, the process of getting back to that agent often led to confusion, customer missteps and starting all over with a new agent. In recent months, we’ve greatly simplified what we call the “suspend and resume” process and see a much higher success rate in reuniting the customer with their agent.

  In situations of an unplanned disconnect, our customers are clear in their disappointment of having to start over with a new agent or wait to be transferred back to their original agent. We’ll be working closely with our vendor in the coming months to build a reconnect solution for these situations.

  We do see comments about the Chat interface needing …a facelift. No surgical procedures required but we’ll be unveiling the Chat makeover at the end of the year! One of the most beloved aspects of chat support is getting the entire transcript delivered via email automatically at the close of the chat interaction. Rest assured, this functionality remains in place.

  Other enhancements on the horizon:

  • Ability to accept payment as part of the chat interaction – great for Chat customers looking to purchase systems, parts or pay for out of warranty repair services
  • We’ll be adding an estimated wait time for times when customers are in queue
  • Often times when troubleshooting, an agent will send the customer a link to a page/site to review. We’ve learned that the customer’s click of this link sometimes causes the chat session to end. The new interface is designed to resolve this problem.

  We always appreciate your open and honest feedback about chat support. We will continue to work on improvements to make it one of the easiest methods to get support from Dell.
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• Find Drivers Specific to Your System on support.dell.com

  Wed. Oct. 08, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  In July,, Eoghan O'Sullivan blogged about enhancements in Drivers & Downloads section of support.dell.com. Back then, Direct2Dell readers like Joseph Thornley thought it was a step in the right direction.

  We've recently expanded drivers by tag globally for selected platforms across Inspiron, Latitude, Optiplex, Dimension, Vostro and Studio lines. Plans are in place to continue the rollout across other products, with Dell Precision workstations up next followed closely by our XPS line of business.

  To get a better idea of what I'm talking about, below is a picture of an old system of mine, a Dimension 8400. If you click on the image to see a larger version, you will see that out of a total of 64 files for the system, my tag only lists 20 total files. It's especially visible in places like video drivers. In the case of my system, it shows only 2 files there—one for the actual driver and a second for a related utility.

  

  Along with the continued rollout of drivers by tag, there's a new ‘Download All’ option across all Dell.com sites. This new functionality provides you with the ability to add multiple drivers to a list for easy download as one file. Hopefully, these enhancements should make downloading your files a lot easier.

  While this is progress, it's clear there's more work to do. Direct2Dell readers like Leeper, sugarbear and jervis961 all recommended that we include a scan utility. Other readers like Steven and AllenC asked us to remove the Flash capability on the support.dell.com website screen where you enter in the kind of system you have. Eogan himself weighed in here saying we do have plans to remove Flash, and that we continue to look at options for scan functionality.
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• Chat with Tech Support when your system is feeling under the weather!

  Wed. Sep. 24, 2008
  by Debbie Davenport, Project Senior Consultant

  Hi, I’m Debbie Davenport and I work with the team that is helping to make chat support available globally for most Dell products.

  Let’s start with a definition. Chat means a lot of things, but I’m referring to online support variety. Here’s how the Wikipedia dictionary defines chat:

  1. To exchange text or voice messages in real time through a computer network, as if having a face-to-face conversation.

  That is an accurate description of the kind of interaction you can expect with Dell’s Technical Support via Chat – an informal conversation in text through a computer network.

  Chat Support isn’t new to Dell but it is growing in popularity with our customers. The US has offered Chat Support for nearly three years and Latin America has offered Chat Support nearly as long.

  Earlier this month we launched Chat support for all of our Canadian Business, Education, Healthcare and Government customers. We’re also focused on expanding chat in other places around the world as well. We have a quickly growing presence of Chat Support for our customers in Europe, Asia and Japan. I’ll talk more about the global aspect in a future post.

  If you are a customer interested in contacting Dell Chat for support, here are a couple ways to do it:

  1. Go to www.Dell.com/chatsupport
  2. From support.dell.com, click on the Chat Online with Technical Support link that looks like this:

  (Editor’s note: some of these images are hyperlinked)

  

  Then enter your service tag on the next screen that looks like this:

  

  You will see a screen like this one:

  

  Note: If your system is not registered to a business, you will not see a Company Name field. You’ll just need to enter your name and e-mail address.

  Also, we will only use your e-mail address to send you a copy of the chat transcript after we complete the chat.

  Click on Continue and you will be in the queue. On the bottom left, you will see details on your place in line.

  

  If you have any questions about the process, please share them here. I hope you find this useful – and hope that we’ll be “chatting” with you soon!
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• NVIDIA GPU Update: Limited Warranty Enhancement Details

  Fri. Sep. 12, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  This is my fourth post on this topic. See this link for all of them.

  Since I first blogged about this back in July, I’ve received many comments from Direct2Dell readers. Before I share more, it’s important to note that many customers may not ever experience video issues related to this, especially if you have updated to the latest BIOS. In other words, just because you have one of the systems in the chart below with an NVIDIA GPU, does not mean you will have video-related problems. If you do experience them, however, we will support you.

  Dell Product Name
  Dell Precision M2300	Latitude D630	Vostro Notebook 1400
  Dell Precision M4300	Latitude D630c	Vostro Notebook 1510
  Dell Precision M65	Latitude D820	Vostro Notebook 1710
  Inspiron 1420	Latitude D830	XPS M1330
  Latitude D620	Vostro Notebook 1310	XPS M1530

  For those customers who haven’t read my previous posts, here’s the summary. My initial post defined the issue and explained that we published BIOS updates (hyperlinked above) that could help reduce the likelihood of GPU failures. In my second post, I published a list of systems that the issue could potentially affect. In my third post, I explained that we intended to offer a 12-month limited warranty enhancement specific to this issue.

  Today, we’re moving forward with that intention.

  Again, the limited warranty enhancement is specific to this issue and will extend coverage by 12 months from the date the original warranty term for the laptop expires. For example, one-year warranties will be extended to 24 months for this issue only. The maximum combined period for the initial warranty and the limited-warranty enhancement is 60 months. Systems purchased with 60-month warranties will not be extended. Customers whose warranties have expired will be eligible for this limited warranty enhancement from the date the initial warranty expired.

  This table above contains the list of laptops that are eligible for this limited warranty enhancement. If your system is not listed, no action is required. Please note that because it is specific to this issue, the warranty enhancement will not be reflected in your overall system warranty that is listed on support.dell.com if you are logged in.

  Over the last several weeks, we have been working with our service teams to ensure that we provide support for all customers worldwide affected by this issue. If your system contains an NVIDIA graphics solution AND it is experiencing one or more of the following symptoms, please contact Dell Technical Support for troubleshooting:

  • Intermittent video issues
  • Multiple images
  • Random characters on the screen
  • Lines on the screen
  • No video

  Customers in the United States can use phone numbers on this page to contact Dell Technical Support.

  Here’s the process for customers outside the United States:

  • Go to support.dell.com
  • At the very bottom of the page, select your country in the Choose a Country/Region field
  • Choose Contact Us on the left hand side
  • Click on the More Details link in the Contact Tech Support section
  • Click on the green Telephone button under the Call Tech Support section

  If you still need help after contacting technical support for this issue, please let me know in the comment thread of this post. Thanks for your patience through this process.
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• Updated FAQ for XPS 630 Owners

  Tue. Sep. 02, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Back in June, CNET's Rich Brown published a post on Crave where he featured a Q&A in regards to issues customers had been discussing regarding the XPS 630. The next day, Russell Thompson blogged about the XPS 630 and LightFX.

  Just to make sure interested customers are aware of the latest information, Chris M. recently published an updated XPS 630 FAQ over at the Dell Community Forum.
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• Accepted Solutions: 10,000 and Counting

  Mon. Aug. 25, 2008
  by Natalie Davis, Manager—Global Ops Community Team

  I blogged about Accepted Solutions a while back—it is a feature that we introduced in our community forums in February. For those that may not remember, Accepted Solutions allows a customer who originates a discussion thread to highlight a post within it that answered or solved their question. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

  Original Post/Question:

  

  Original Poster selects the post within the thread that answered their question and that post becomes the Accepted Solution:

  

  Back when I blogged about it in April, we had just crossed the 5,000 mark. Things are still humming along over the last four months—last week we crossed the 10,000 mark for Accepted Solutions. So, why does this matter for the community? Two reasons: 1) our customers who use our products every day are the ones in best position to say what fixes their problem and 2) Connecting new customers with information that helps them with their product is one of the most important things we need to get better at across our community sites.

  Taking a deeper dive into the 10,000, have a guess as to what the most viewed accepted solution is addressing? It’s instructions on how to downgrade from Vista to XP, with over 7,000 views and solved by community member mfinnan101. Choices in operating systems, whether it’s more systems available with XP or Linux, has been a hot topic and discssion for our community and one of the most popular topics on IdeaStorm.

  The forum board with the most Accepted Solutions is XPS Desktops with 939, followed by XPS Laptops with 564. Both boards have a wide range of questions and answers about support, how-to’s, and what to buy. As for the community members who have contributed and created the most accepted solutions, the honor goes to ejn63 with a total of 683 and has posted over 57,000 times on our forum, followed by SR45 with 319 and has posted over 25,000 times.

  If you are familiar with forum threads, you can probably attest . That finding an answer is not always easy. Accepted Solutions give other users an easier way to find the post within the thread that holds the answer, without having to read through the entire thread. Case in point, the average views of an Accepted Solution is increasing—right now, the average is about250 views per accepted solution, and 2.5 million views totalMoving forward, with some of the integration that Lionel hinted at is still being worked on. We hope to facilitate this process so that more customers who need answers can find them.
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• Dell and Radian6: It All Starts with Listening

  Tue. Aug. 19, 2008
  by Sean McDonald, Director—Community | Conversations

  Last June, when I took part in the 2008 Social Commerce Summit, I blogged about the impact of customers talking about businesses they either like or don’t like. That trend continues to increase, and the only way to have a good sense for those conversations is to learn how to monitor them in social media realms.

  Everyone says they listen to customers. But what does that mean from a social media standpoint? While the concept of listening is rather simple to describe, the actual execution is anything but. The challenge is similar to entering a large sports arena with 100,000 fans. And tens of thousands of conversations are occurring simultaneously. Now increase the number of conversations to millions across every language – that equals the daily web activity.

  Dell first started to tackle this challenge back in April 2006 when we started looking for conversations about Dell in blogs. It’s something that I know Lionel has blogged about several times and he’s said we started from pretty humble beginnings. In those early days, I know we started tracking things with a customized Technorati search string and an Excel spreadsheet.

  Fast forward to today and it’s even more complex, primarily because there are many more places where conversations are occurring. It’s not just blogs—they’re also happening on sites like Friendfeed, YouTube and Twitter. As an example, the Vostro keyboard issue started in a Flickr discussion thread.

  Over the last couple of years, we looked at a lot of services to help monitor this growing amount of activity. Many of those services do specific pieces pretty well. But until recently, we’ve hadn’t found a good way to monitor all of them collectively—to get a good feel for both the individual voices and the bigger picture of what those voices are saying.

  These days we’re using a web-based tool called Radian6, and it’s a big leap forward compared to our early days in monitoring. We’ve been working with the team at Radian6 and are pretty excited to be part of what’s happening next.  Radian6 and Dell share the same approach to social media.

  • Listen to your customers
  • Join your customers online wherever their conversations are taking place
  • Help your customer tell their stories

  In this video, their CEO Marcel LeBrun discusses how Radian6 sees brands participating online in new ways.
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• NVIDIA GPU Update: Dell to Offer Limited Warranty Enhancement to All Affected Customers Worldwide

  Mon. Aug. 18, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  I've said in my past two posts (here's post #1 and here's post #2) and in the comment threads on this topic that I would share more details when I had them. Here's the deal:

  Dell will offer a 12-month limited warranty enhancement specific to this issue. For all customers worldwide, we plan to add 12 months of coverage for this issue to the existing limited warranty up to 60 months from the date of purchase for the following systems:

  Dell Product Name
  Dell Precision M2300	Latitude D630	Vostro Notebook 1400
  Dell Precision M4300	Latitude D630c	Vostro Notebook 1510
  Dell Precision M65	Latitude D820	Vostro Notebook 1710
  Inspiron 1420	Latitude D830	XPS M1330
  Latitude D620	Vostro Notebook 1310	XPS M1530

   

  Update: Over the last few days, customers like Steve Johnson, John and Robert have asked if their systems are affected. Throughout this process, Dell has undertaken a detailed assessment of this issue.  If your system is not listed in the table above, you do not need to do anything. If you have one of the systems listed above with an NVIDIA graphics card and are experiencing video-related issues I described in the bullet point section of my first post about NVIDIA GPUs, please contact Dell Technical Support.

  Details of the service plan will be available in the next few weeks. When I have more details to share, I will do so.

  In the meantime, thanks to all of our customers for your patience through this process. We appreciate your business and are committed to serving all of you who are impacted.  
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• Stereo Mix Record Functionality and Dell

  Fri. Aug. 15, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Stereo mix record capability in sound cards and audio chips is the source of many discussions and much confusion in the blogosphere. A post from Chad Lakkis over at ripten.com a while back sparked some conversations on other sites like Gizmodo and Techdirt.

  Truth is that there’s a lot of confusion about this issue. Part of the confusion is that stereo mix is also referred to as different things. People also call it things like "record what you hear" or "waveout mix." Desktop and notebooks equipped with sound cards (or with integrated sound components) generally have a few different ways to record audio:

  • through a microphone
  • from the line-in port
  • stereo mix/ WAVE out

  Before I get into the broader discussion about what’s going on, I want to be clear: Dell did not disable stereo mix functionality due to pressure from the Recording Industry Association of America. That speculation is simply not true.

  Here’s what happened: there are two ways for stereo mix functionality can be enabled: at the hardware or software level. Long before Vista was here, we supported stereo mix at the hardware level for integrated audio and in desktops. Back during Vista's development, Dell made decisions to remove stereo mix functionality at the hardware level based on Microsoft's initial Vista software requirements. Those requirements were later changed by Microsoft, but too late for Dell to add that functionality back at a hardware level in products nearing launch.

  Due to customer feedback, we’ve re-assessed things and have made the decision to enable stereo mix functionality in hardware on new notebooks starting with the Studio 15 and Studio 17 laptops. There will be many other notebooks coming in the future that will support stereo mix at the hardware level. Devices that support stereo mix functionality at hardware level will work with Vista and Windows XP. 

  If you want to dig a litte depper into this topic, take a look at these threads on our community forums for more information.
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• Latest on the NVIDIA GPU Issue for Dell Laptop Customers

  Fri. Aug. 08, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Back in July, I blogged about BIOS updates for systems that could experience graphics card problems caused by weak die/packaging material set from some NVIDIA mobile GPUs. Since then, lots of customers have commented on our blogs and have asked questions.

  Though the actual number of affected laptops is limited, many of you expressed concern for potential problems in the future, and we can understand that. We are committed to serving our customers.  We do intend to offer modified service terms to specifically support all customers worldwide who are affected by this issue. Right now, our teams are working through details. When I have specifics to share about service terms, I will do that here.

  Beyond questions about support, lots of Direct2Dell readers like Majortom1981, Carsten and Guiyo have asked if their systems are potentially affected.  

   See table below for clarification on this front:

  Dell Product Name
  Dell Precision M2300	Latitude D630	Vostro Notebook 1400
  Dell Precision M4300	Latitude D630c	Vostro Notebook 1510
  Dell Precision M65	Latitude D820	Vostro Notebook 1710
  Inspiron 1420	Latitude D830	XPS M1330
  Latitude D620	Vostro Notebook 1310	XPS M1530

  The laptops with hyperlinks in the table above are the ones with updated BIOS versions that modify the fan profile in the system. The above links will take you directly to the BIOS download for that system.  If you own one of the hyperlinked systems in the table, Dell strongly encourages you to update the system BIOS. Please refer to my first post for more information regarding BIOS updates.

  Like I mentioned in my earlier post, if you are already experiencing symptoms like multiple images, random characters on the screen, lines on the screen or you have no video signal, updating your system BIOS will not correct them. Please contact Dell Technical Support—here’s how to do that:

  • Go to support.dell.com
  • Choose your country or region from the drop-down list
  • Choose Contact Us
  • Choose Technical Support
  • Choose Call Technical Support

  I know there are many other questions out there. When there are more details to share, I will blog about them here. Until then, thanks for your continued patience. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
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