My attention was drawn to this blogpost by Howard in his blog Kongtechnology.com
This was brought to my attention because of my interest in customer service. An acquaintance of mine wanting to buy a Dell Laptop came across this blog post on his search and promptly passed it on to me.
My initial reaction was to chuckle at the discomfort of Dell and forget about it, but my friend’s decision to buy a Lenova instead of a Dell made me pause.
I am no longer actively involved in day to day business matters or policies and Management education or any of those nice high sounding phrases and activities. I am however saddened that a company with the reputation of Dell has lost a customer because of some stupidity of their foot soldiers.
It would be nice if people looking after customer interfaces in companies would spend some time and effort in training the front line people. I find it so frustrating sometimes to go through automated telephone systems that I have stopped using them and prefer to send emails or opt for personal meetings.
I hope that Dell would have learnt something from this story. If they had not, and say take action like say Honda would have, recall the computers and replace them, they would surely lose customers like they just did my friend.