From: davidsen@ariel.crd.GE.COM (william E Davidsen)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Re: >>An example of Dell's product support (Esix here I come...)
Date: 22 Jul 92 21:10:21 GMT
Reply-To: davidsen@crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corporate R&D Center, Schenectady NY

In article <+mfm04=@dixie.com>, jgd@dixie.com (John De Armond) writes:
| donn@dellunix.dell.com (Donn Baumgartner) writes:
| 
| >I have taken a lot of heat here for expressing my personal opinion of
| >various people's use of the net.  So be it.  But it's my *personal* opinion
| >only, not Dell's (as if that wasn't clear already).  Dell does not approve.
| 
| Riiight.  What Dell needs to do right now is to fire your ass,
| make that fact publicly known and appologize to Stan for the
| corporate attitude  expressed.  That would certainly satisfy me.

This is my understanding of the situation:

  I think you have over reacted a bit here. Dell had tried to fix the
problem with the third party hardware, and had not been able to solve
it. So the customer started badmouthing Dell in this forum, faulting
them for not having solved this problem which was not of their making.

  At that point Donn, who had heard about the problem because support
had brought it back to the developers trying to the customer, decided he
didn't like being blackmailed and said a few things about the customer
which struck home. Now the customer and a few others are reading this as
a lack of support, badmouthing Dell, asking for Donn to be punished,
etc.

  I personally thought the original post complaining about Dell was
totally unjustified, and that they had really tried to help.

| "F*ck the user.  It's not our problem when popular hardware does
| not work.  Let him figure it out.  After all, we've already been
| paid." 

  You're right. It's not their problem when popular hardware doesn't
work, they are totally up front about it more than any other UNIX vendor
in the business. They promise it will work on their hardware. They tell
you it might not on some other hardware. They give the customer 30 days
to try it on that other hardware. And after all this good faith dealing
the customer was still upset because the software didn't work on
non-Dell hardware.

| Now to the Dell side.  Even though I no longer actively pursue consulting
| work, I still take care of a few old clients.  I dropped by a client
| this morning on the way to another appointment.  I handed him a
| printout of Donn's remarks.  You see, he is opening another store and
| was considering buying Dell turnkey Unix systems - at my suggestion - 
| instead of more clones and ISC as we'd done in the past.  I had suggested
| Dell primarily because I no longer had the time to fight ISC wars
| to make things work so factory support would have been useful.  My new
| advice was to call both HP and Sun and see what they have to say.

  I hope your old clients treat you like you're treating Dell! I hope
someone take something you sold and tried to use it with something you
never promised would work, and never knew about, and when it won't work
they badmouth you everywhere, including making a special effort to
contact prospective customers and hurt your sales, while smearing your
reputation.

  It would give me great pleasure to see you smeared by the same
baseless innuendo you are using on Dell.
| 
| I've chatted for the last few days on our local ham radio repeater 
| about this incident.  Our repeater was built so that several
| dozen of us PC Unix whizzards who are also hams would have a place
| to swap notes and generally talk geek things.  From the response 
| another merchant friend of mine has had at the mere mention of
| a good deal, I suspect there are as many as 50 additional 
| people who either lurk and don't talk or listen in on scanners.
| Several of us had contemplated Dell as an alternative to ISC in order
| to get some support.  I think that issue is resolved.  At least with
| ISC, a posting here or some carefully addressed Email will usually
| result in the answer.

  I hope some other users of that repeater will take the time to tell
the whole story, rather than your biased fragment.

| Finally I've been sitting for a couple of months on an invitation to write
| a guest editorial on customer service in another magazine.  I plan to 
| contrast good and bad support.  Every time I thought I had the worst
| possible example of customer support, something else has come up to
| superceed it.  Unless I see something from Dell to refute what Donn 
| has said here, I think I've found my bad example.

  Sure, let's not publish the response of support, let's talk about the
unofficial griping of one employee who clearly states that he doesn't
speak for Dell. Representing that as an example of the company support
is deliberately misleading, particularly since Dell tried to help
instead of just saying it wasn't their problem.

| Donn, even though you're a developer and thus assumed to have no social
| graces, you should consider a little trueism from the sales side. (gasp)
| It goes something like this:  "A satisfied customer will tell an average
| of 2 people.  A pissed customer will tell an average of 7."
| It may not kill you immediately but those odds do stack against you in
| the long run.

  And someone who is pissed because he expects more than any vendor
could ever deliver will tell more than that. Some customers are just
never satisfied, expect services clearly stated as not be offered, and
then tell the world that they were robbed. Perhaps because it so hard to
admit to being a foolish and unreasonable customer.
-- 
bill davidsen, GE Corp. R&D Center; Box 8; Schenectady NY 12345
	It never ceases to amaze me that otherwise rational people, able to
	understand calculus, compound interest, and the income tax form, can
	continue to believe that poker is a game of chance.
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386