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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stock bull who wrote (168483)	1/20/2002 11:50:54 PM
From: Meathead	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Re: Customer service... Do you think that we should contact Michael Dell and draw his attention to the situation? I'm almost positive MD is aware of the situation. TechWeek I believe, (or some very popular tech industry periodical) back in November or December wrote a very long article about Dell's customer service problems and how bad things have gotten. If I find it, I'll post it. Dell isn't alone. Here's one on HP's problems. www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?doc_id=205853&channel=artcol.jhtml&_DARGS=%2Ffragments%2Ffrg_column_archive.jhtml_A&_DAV=artcol.jhtml Most everyone in the PC biz has let customer service decline. Why? My belief is that you get what you pay for. Look at the prices of PC's these days.... dirt cheap and we know it's a razor thin margin business. Who can afford to scale the service business with huge volume increases, price/profit erosion and be competitive? Dell puts more emphasis on product quality and out-of-box-experience so that the number of calls, defects and returns doesn't bring them to their knees. >97% of all shipments to consumers are defect free within the first 90 days in terms of getting the order exactly right with no hardware defects. Most people get a great PC/Notebook at a bargain price and never need to call customer support. However, if you do have a problem... good luck. It could get resolved quickly or turn out to be a nightmare. It didn't used to be that way with Dell when the average selling price of a PC was $2500 and they shipped only 2 million units a year. But Dell isn't alone and it's not just the PC biz. The relentless drive for profits and market share has turned customer service into a joke for most high volume consumer driven companies these days and it aggravates me to no end. Many of the products I buy turn out to be junk, defective or just plain crap forcing me to deal with the part of a company I hate most... customer service. Two of my recent favorites are SWBell and Ford. Two of the most unbelieveably inept, screwed-up, confused, backward, hillbilly moron customer service models I've dealt with this year... and it's only January. MEATHEAD

To: stock bull who wrote (168483)	1/21/2002 4:53:30 PM
From: kemble s. matter	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

Larry, Hi!! RE: Any ideas on this matter will be appreciated. I'm sure he's aware that the service is not what it used to be in some areas...As Meathead just said margins are so thin that everyone may be dropping to ball to some degree...I'd like to think that ...although it's impossible...everyone was being taken care of... Yet, while visiting one of the assembly plants I do recall the plan and design DELL Investor Relations explained to us...This plan eliminated so many potential problems by having a tighter accountability on all parts prior to entering the assembly line...MH is right...DELL already has prevented many many more problems from occurring that other manufacturers would love to have the ability to eliminate... I don't believe this solves the problem Larry... And a bad experience is a bad experience...Let's just hope that with the millions of units that DELL produces problems like this can still be solved...I would imagine someone would bring it up at the shareholders unless they spend the majority of the time allowing someone to ask management for dividends... :o( Best, Kemble