Someone Professional 2

I had to spend another week with the Dell technical support and baby sit their onsite technicians who visited my venue. Its always nice to talk to Dell technical support executive on telephone. They are polite, soft and they understand what I say unlike their onsite counter parts (except few). While it is OK to call technical support once (during the entire life time of the product) but NOT nice to call the same company around five times in three months. It not only brings negative impression on the product and the company but also it is annoying when I really cannot use the product until the problem is resolved. And the experience with the onsite technicians totally rips apart any remaining positive view of the brand.

I was in dilemma if I should let Dell know about my experience with their onsite technician. He might have done things out of ignorance, but for me he was sent by Dell and he was an representative of Dell and its not wrong on me to expect someone as professional as the people who are on telephone and someone to assure me and make me feel that yes he is indeed from Dell. I do not only expect the presence of Dell on the papers he brought but the way he behaved, but I saw Dell only on papers.

I discussed with couple of friends and asked if I should let know Dell about the guy who surprised me. So, when I got a feedback call from an executive I told him about my experience, and the executive was very cooperative and gave me his mail address and asked me to write him the incident in detail. I wrote him an email about the incident. I got a call back and there was another executive who enquired me about the incident and assured me that it wont happen again. I thought it was all over but I got another call again in an hour and this time the executive told me that the technician I wrote about is on line (conf call) and wanted to sort things between us. I always thought that feedback about a particular person were kept confidential (privacy policy?) and the person just gets the details without who gave the feedback. I was bit worried because I believe that they do not have total control over the onsite engineers action and the other reason is I felt bad for the technician. I gave feedback in a hope that the technician would get a chance to correct himself, but confronting him along with the customer is something I do not support. Feedbacks are NOT for naming and shaming but to correct oneself.

After the call I honestly felt guilty and thought that I should have just let it go. There can be many reasons why he could have behaved that way. Onsite technicians are trained to repair the machine and I believe that they are NOT trained in soft skills as the executives who attend calls. Who are to be blamed for this? The technician or the company who failed to provide training on soft skills. But at the end of the day its the customer who has to deal with unpleasant technicians and when the customers makes a complain its the Technician who gets black listed. What about the company that hired them?

I am not generalizing here, I had equally good experience with onsite technicians from Dell. I also came across very cooperative and helpful onsite technicians from Dell who make me feel good and worth for the money and trust I put on Dell. But when I come across unpleasant experience it makes me forget the good ones. But now the question is, should Dell sell me a product which needs five onsite technicians to replace parts for it in three months? That is something Dell has to answer!

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