Dell Account Rep Nightmare - Update 1

I spoke with Chris, who is the Regional Sales Manager for the New York area. Essentially, I’m pretty much stuck where I am now. The idea is to give the new account team 90 days, and then from there we’ll see what happens. Not to sound too cynical, but I am sure that what will happen is if this new team isn’t great, in 90 days I’ll get moved to another team instead of back where I wanted to be with my former rep.

I tried to impress on Dell that I wasn’t going to walk away from that phone call happy unless my account moved back to where it was.

A long time customer of Dell, who is blatantly telling Dell that they are unhappy,  and making a reasonable request that will solve the problem was basically told to suck it up and deal with it.

My company would never think of treating a customer like that. But even then, if one of our customers was unhappy, we’d pretty much do anything to resolve the problem.

Dell has come under a lot of fire recently. First, they took a lot of slag (rightly so) for their consumer level customer support being sub-par. They worked to improve communication between end users and Dell by monitoring blogs, starting their own blog, and proactively solving problems. (They replaced my Inspiron 700m with a XPS M1210 after the Inspiron broke three times and came back from their repair depot more broken than it had arrived there.) Their direct sale business model has apparently peaked and isn’t carrying the company any more, so they’re branching out to retail shops. Mike Dell is again CEO. Financial problems.

I am a huge Dell fan. I’ve always had good luck with the Optiplex, Latitude, and PowerEdge line of gear. The Dimensions we have are stable enough. The Inspiron laptops we have, including the E1505 that I am tying this on now, hold up somewhat well but end up looking a bit worse for wear. Our entire switching infrastructure runs on Dell switches. We have a huge VMWare farm running on really high end PowerEdge 1950’s. We’re now reselling Dell gear.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that we’re not buying at the volume of Dell’s largest accounts. But we’re certainly not stingy with the revenue we’re giving them now. To top it off, I’m pretty much responsible for our switch to Dell, since my co-workers all love IBM and HP gear. It amazes me that I’m getting the runaround from Dell over this.