Dell Canada is not your friend
by Glenn Caleval, Monday March 26, 2007
My experience with Dell Canada is frustrating for one simple reason: their products are very good. I own an XPS M2010 (the 20 inch laptop) and a 22 inch LCD monitor. Unfortunately I can’t say “proudly own” even though I love both devices. Because Dell is a nightmare in every other respect
If you are considering purchasing from Dell, accept my heartfelt plea for your well-being and turn, run, flee as fast and as far from any possible source of a Dell purchase.
Here’s the true story of one Dell customer, me, in the aftermath of spending almost $6,000 on a spanking new, fully loaded, top of the line, top of its class, portable computer known as the XPS M2010. This story includes at the end the discovery of a serious plan to manipulate and use ALL Dell customers. If you aren’t interested in the specific story, to skip to that part click here.
I rapidly fell in love with the machine and made it my preferred work station. Very quickly I realized I didn’t want to haul the power supply back and forth from my Walking Dolphins (tm) office to my client site office.
Going back to eBay where I purchased the machine I couldn’t locate the proper power supply but did find a completed sale for a “wrap around carrying case.” I decided I wanted that also.
So off I went to Dell.com. I quickly located the two items and proceeded through the check out procedure at which point I was informed that Canadians cannot purchase from Dell.com but must go through dell.ca. Okay, a bit frustrating but at least in principle I could have read their various policies before doing my shopping, so my bad.
Over to dell.ca I go. The items are no where to be found no matter how far I drill down using their search tools. I see the option to enter a “Service Tag.” I go into the Dell folder on my XPS and there’s a program labeled “Express Service Code.” Victory (I thought) as on execution the program displays both a Service Tag and an Express Service Code. Remember this Service Tag thing as it is the foundation of a remarkably bizarre strategy Dell has to manipulate its own customers.
I key in the Service Tag to the dell.ca product search engine and it accurately selects the XPS M2010. But still no power supply and no carrying case.
Enough of the web, I call the Customer Service toll free. I wait 20 minutes on hold. When I finally get someone I walk through what I need and the fact that I can’t find it on the Canadian site but know both products exist because I found them on the American site. The Dell rep recommends I simply purchase them from Dell in the U.S.
So I call the Dell U.S. sales line. After walking through the tale again I am told that Dell U.S. is forbidden from making sales to Canadians. I point out that Dell has got me in a circle of hell and it is simply a matter of them refusing to take my money. Why, I ask, would you make it so difficult to actually make a sale to a willing customer. In response I get the recommendation to get an American friend to place the order for delivery to a U.S. address and then have that friend ship it to me.
I call back Dell Canada since they advised me the solution was to buy it in the U.S. I get a rather pleasant women who sympathizes with my plight and herself finds it difficult to believe that the accessories would not be available in Canada. To shorten the story, I go through two more rounds with Dell Canada until I finally get someone who determines that in Canada these accessories are considered “replacement parts” and therefore sales cannot help. I have to buy them from the parts department.
The parts department is only open on restricted hours so I have to wait to call during 8:00 to 5:00 their time. I do call from my client’s site and the first thing the parts department asks for is the Service Tag. I don’t have the XPS with me (remember, I decided I wasn’t going to lug the power supply and now to get a power supply I would have had to lug the power supply) and so no service tag.
I ask them to look me up by name. Can’t be done. What can be done? Have I purchased anything else from Dell? Yes, I bought a 22 inch LCD monitor and love it. No good, monitors don’t have service tags... But the women does track down the account containing the monitor transaction but cannot find any way to connect me to the XPS.
I ask her, what does it matter? The worst case scenario is that I buy the wrong power supply but you can make sure that doesn’t happen by simply ensuring the power supply is compatible with the XPS M2010 model.
I am informed that the systems have been created to completely disallow any sale of “parts” without a Service Tag. Fine. It’s nuts, but I’ll get the service tag and call back.
It is important to note that at none of these calls did I wait less than 10 minutes to get any kind of answer and then spent considerable time on repeated holds while the reps consulted the Dell brain trust.
I ended up doing some traveling and being preoccupied with business so let the whole thing go for several weeks. By coincidence one day a colleague was having trouble with Dell service, spending long times on hold and having little success during those times he was not on hold. That reminded me I still wanted to get my second power supply and the ever-elusive carrying case.
The next day I bring the holy Service Tag to work and place the call. The rep I talk to quickly informs me that I am not allowed to make any purchases for “that particular machine.” Why on earth not, I ask, completely taken aback.
“Because there has been a hold put on your account.”
A hold? why the hell would there be a hold on my account? I pay my bills and in fact when I bought the monitor you took the cash from my credit card account long before the monitor arrived. What’s going on?
So the women puts me on hold to consult her supervisor. I am told that the service tag I provided is attached to a different customer record and for that reason they cannot sell me anything.
I clearly and carefully told her that I bought the machine brand new from a reputable eBay seller, thinking from the way she was verbally dancing that she really wanted to come out and say her supervisor thinks I have a stolen computer. She tells me I will have to get the seller to contact Dell and have the registration for the machine changed to my name and address. After much more verbal acrobatics I ask to speak to her supervisor. She demurs, saying she just completed getting this explanation from her supervisor to which I respond that I’ll happily talk to her supervisor’s supervisor, but before I gave up on this I would insist on one more chance for Dell to make sense.
The supervisor gets on and is immediately antagonistic. I ask her why it matters to them where any of their customers buy their machines? I’m told it’s the way they do things and that under no circumstances will I be allowed to purchase anything for that machine. I ask her what happens if a Dell customer decides to upgrade and sells his old Dell to a neighbour. The answer is that you have to transfer the registration.
So get this straight. Dell now has a plan that no one can be a casual purchaser of a Dell system. If you buy a used system, you must get the seller to do the paperwork to transfer the registration in Dell’s customer files. In this case I pointed out the potential difficulty: the seller already has my $6,000. He has no incentive whatever to sit on hold waiting on Dell disService and then to complete whatever bureaucratic exercise they have created for him. It’s absurd on its face.
And what if you are one of those people, like me, who does not want to be in corporate customer databases? I complete some registrations with fabricated information just so I can get to the driver downloads without having to rent out part of my life to some tech company. For all I know the existing “registration” they have on my XPS is one I created and just don’t recall.
Is Dell saying that to ever be entitled to purchase from Dell you must agree to allow them to track your personal information? Worse, they do not tell you up front that if you do not go through their registration process -- and maintain it -- that you will never be allowed to purchase necessary replacement parts. In my case the “parts” are not necessary and are not parts at all, but what if I do need a real part to keep the machine functioning? I suspect that this policy is contrary to Canadian law (PIPEDA) and will be making a formal complaint. That law states the provision of personal information cannot cannot.be a condition of providing a good or service.
More, the failure to include a warning of these extortionary tactics is in itself of dubious legal virtue. In what sense is it extortion? Quite simply, Dell is saying that if a customer -- someone who has already paid money for one of their products -- fails to surrender the information that Dell in its sole judgment deems is necessary, the customer can expect to end up with a lump of useless weight should anything at all need service or support. “Do what I want or be deprived of legitimate value that you have paid for” IS extortion.
But why is Dell stooping to these low-life tactics?
It seems to me that the only thing they can hope to accomplish with this new Tagging of their customers is to make it difficult for people to sell used Dell computers, while keeping a tight reign on existing customers. They are trying to do to hardware what Microsoft has done to software with the online digital registrations and the “don’t change your system by more than three factors or the license dies” and so on. Dell is trying to make hardware an intangible so they can discover more ways to drive cash from their customers.
To make things really sunny at the end of my final call with the “under no circumstances” supervisor, I informed her that I would be quoting her and that I had recorded the entire conversation. “I didn’t give you permission to record me!” she shrieked.
“In Canada, I don’t need your permission,” I responded, “so long as you are a known party to a conversation it is perfectly legal to record it.”
In fact, the courts have held and the laws have not limited the holding, that recording a conversation to which you are a party is simply an extended form of taking notes. As long as everyone involved knows you are present and listening, you don’t even have to actively participate and you can even lie and say “I’m not recording this.”
What is sweet about it of course is the fact that at the start of every Dell telephone call is the message “your call may be recorded....” but gods forbid if the shoe is on the other foot.
For the record, that call took 49 minutes and 33 seconds, with almost all that time on hold.
For goodness sake, do yourself a favour and avoid Dell like the plague.
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