I’m having a look at Dell’s web site to see if the $2,000 laptop I want to get is still about $1,800 more than I can afford, and came across this little bit of confusion.
Dell currently offers small businesses four types of warranty programs. The most basic is pretty clear — you mail them your computer, do without it for some unstated period of time, and they’ll mail it back to you, hopefully in a fixed condition. If not, you can mail it back to them again.
I really can’t tell the difference between the next two options, except that one costs $150 more than the other:
get enhanced protection for your new notebook, including Next-Business-Day On-Site Service(*), for more convenient service resolution should the unexpected occur.
get a cost-effective On-Site Service(*) plan that frees you from worry about damage from most accidental drops, breaks and spills.
Now, for the challenge: which of these is the more expensive plan? Can you guess? Isn’t it strange that you have to guess? (Not to mention that there’s a reasonably good chance that you guessed wrong, since the description of the more expensive one implies less service than the cheaper one.)
For an extra $100, the fourth plan gives you the same asterisk and offers speedier issue resolution than the next-day service offered in option 2 (but not 3). Living where I do, I’d like to see that.
If you scroll down, they give you some more useful information. The fourth option doesn’t actually mean faster than next-day service, it just means that you won’t be on hold for as long (average of 2 minutes, instead of whatever the others get) and are less likely to get someone reading a script in India. In fact, they guarantee that you’ll actually get someone who’s trained (yes, they wrote that), and even better, that they’ll “bypass basic troubleshooting questions and connect directly to high-level technicians to address your specific questions” (direct quote).
Why not offer that to everyone? Offer two warranty options — the mail-in one with script-readers for the people who want the cheapest thing possible without having no warranty at all, and the more expensive one which actually offers good service. The other two are just going to frustrate your customers, which seems like a bad (if common) business practice to me.
Oh, and for reference, I have three problems with customer support being in India, China, etc., none of which have to do with the people
1) they’re usually just reading scripts, and are not actually knowledgeable about the area in which they’re working, nor do they have any authority to do anything outside of the script, in my experience
2) this is improving, but for a while it was comical just trying to be understood and to understand — admittedly, this is a problem for me even in the US or Canada, but far worse when dealing with two foreign accents instead of just one, usually with a bad phone connection just to make things interesting.
3) the jobs are being outsourced purely to save money. I’ve never heard of customer service, programming, etc., being outsourced because there are better programmers or customer service representatives elsewhere, though that may be true. I have heard of outsourcing programming to save time, but in my very scant experience, that doesn’t work in the long run. Sacrificing quality, customer satisfaction, or whatever, to save money isn’t a good long-term strategy, even if it makes the investors happy who are looking purely at today’s results compared to yesterday’s.
