It’s a cliche that they used to teach in Marketing schools all over the world. A happy customer tells 1 person, a dissatisfied customer tells 10. That was then, this is now. With the advent of social media, a customer who has a bad experience can tell millions.

Someone at DELL, probabaly in marketing, has swallowed the manual that says that a company should engage with its customers. The company has about 25 twitter accounts, some more active than others. Pity they don’t invest so much in their customer service infrastructure.

Last week, my DELL XPS M1330 laptop started to behave strangely. The symptoms included the screen being covered in vertical multicolored lines.

The first email went to support on Saturday the 27th of June. The reply took 2 days, arriving on the 29th of June at 17:31 – it suggested that the problem was not with the computer, but rather a software issue.  It read:

Being a hardware technician, I would ensure (sic) that the hardware is working properly.

In fact I had restored the computer to a previous state and the problem seemed to be less, but there was a niggling doubt that there was something wrong with the computer itself. The laptop seemed to work ok for a couple of days with the occasional crash, but always re-started.

On Wednesday morning I flew to Sweden, with the computer to cover Match Cup Sweden as a sports journalist. Arriving on the island of Marstrand, the computer failed to even boot without getting the multicolored lines.

This failure resulted in me contacting DELL again on the 2nd of July. That evening at 8pm GMT+1 I was called in Sweden by a DELL agent telling me that the graphics card would need to be replaced. As the computer is under warranty, he could arrange for someone to replace the card. The earliest date – the 7th of July when I was back in the UK.

Despite telling the agent on the phone that it would be most convenient for the technician to arrive in the morning, he could only offer me the usual inflexible “sometime between 9 and 5″ response.

He did however say that I could reschedule the call if it was not convenient. He also arranged for someone to call to tell me when the engineer would arrive on the day.

Yesterday, I waited for the call from customer service. 8am … 9am… 10am… While on the phone to a paying client, the customer service centre called to say that he would come, but called from a witheld number, not allowing me to return and cancel the visit.

According to my twitter feed, I then spent over an hour trying to talk to someone at DELL to cancel the engineer. The first call was made just after 10am and was put into a queue… after 30 minutes with no indication that I was progressing through the queue, I hung up and redialled.

Finally after 5 calls, 9 receptionists and over 50 minutes on hold, I spoke to someone. This agent assured me that I did not have to cancel the call, but instead I could reschedule for the following day. This later turned out to be completely false it seems.

I then spent the rest of the day in pre-arranged meetings offsite. From what I can gather, the engineer never heard from DELL and turned up anyway. He called, but left no message.

Last night I received a call that the engineer would not be turning up on Wednesday, but after I explained the earlier call, they looked at the system and said that they would.

Today, I called DELL just to check if the engineer was coming. The response was that since the technician had tried to call yesterday, I had to rearrange for tomorrow. Seems that my call had gone to a different call centre and it was assigned to a different case number and basically, they had no idea.

Of course now that I am a frustrated customer, they can magically guarantee that the call will be in the morning, which if they had done yesterday, I would have been here! Today’s call was over 30 minutes.

Now I wait, with a DELL laptop that has been malfunctioning for over a week and a half. The outsourced customer service people don’t care about the long term damage they do to the DELL brand, the marketing directors and brand teams should know just how detrimental these events can be.

Lines like “next time you call DELL it will be better” are priceless. I don’t want to call DELL – I want a computer that does what it was sold to do.

So now I wait to see if they can get someone to fix the computer tomorrow. It means I have to postpone more meetings, but don’t worry. I will be informing my clients that the reason they can not be looked after is because my supplier DELL let me down.

Last week I got a customer service survey from Pay-Pal that asked if my experience with them had caused me financial loss. It was a bold question to ask, but showed that they understand that phrases like “we are sorry for the inconvenience” don’t really go far enough.

An inconvenience is a bus being late, or a plate of soup being too cold. An inconvenience is having to wait in line at a supermarket checkout or an internet transaction for a CD failing. This is my production line, my shop-front, my supply chain…

This is a buying decision that is not to be taken lightly and DELL are going to have to work very very hard to regain any brand loyalty they might have had from me.

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