Posted by Tom Moertel
Tue, 27 Jun 2006 21:41:00 GMT
Recently I wrote about a bad support experience I had with Dell. Today in my inbox was an invitation to participate in a survey about my experience.
I accepted.
My survey responses, which were completely honest, were not glowing. Although Dell ultimately resolved my problem (the cabling shipment arrived the following day), the hoops I was forced to jump through were unacceptable. Dell’s support seemed fundamentally broken, and I had to fight to make it work.
When asked what Dell would need to do before I would feel comfortable recommending them to others, I wrote:
I would need confidence that Dell makes it easy for clued-in technical customers to speak with clued-in support personnel. As things stand, clued-in customers waste too much time on the phone with ineffective support personnel. In my case, I was handed off numerous times and ended up speaking with seven support persons, and only the final person had the knowledge and empowerment to make the situation right for this customer.
I also gave them a link to my article about the experience. It will be interesting to see if anybody reads it.
In any case, I am glad I received the survey invitation. At least it shows that Dell is trying to improve. Further, the survey asked the right questions: I was able to adequately express my dissatisfaction and point out where I thought their process had broken down.
I do hope somebody at Dell figures it out because support is the company’s Achilles heel. HP, in my experience, smokes Dell in this regard.
Update: It looks like my article got the attention of
CMP Media’s
CRN, a source of “vital information for VARs and technology integrators.” Edward F. Moltzen linked to my article in his article of 6 July 2006:
Dell Works, Spends To Get Back Into Good Graces.
Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, on the very same day, a “customer advocate” with Dell’s headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, sent me an email offering help and asking for feedback. Owing to a mix-up, I did not receive his email until he re-sent it on 11 July, but I have since responded with a detailed summary of my experience.
Things are getting interesting.
Update 2006-07-21: It seems the Dell customer advocate was serious
about fixing problems. He reviewed my case and was able to identify a
user-interface problem with Dell’s web site that probably led to a
good part of my difficulties. The problem is that a non-support phone
number is offered in a portion of the support section of Dell’s web
site. Customers, like me, who call the phone number are connected to
people trained to handle pre-invoice issues, not support. Oops.
As of this writing, the UI problem still exists, but I trust that
it will be solved soon.
Posted in hardware, business
Tags dell, support
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Tue, 27 Jun 2006 18:21:00 GMT
I have a bunch of LectroTest news. LectroTest, as you may know, is a specification-based,
automatic testing system for Perl. It may look like Haskell’s QuickCheck, but it tastes like sweet, sweet Perl.
LectroTest 0.3500 was released
This version adds automatic tools for recording and playing back
failures. Using them, you can automatically build regression-testing
suites and incorporate them into your testing plan. All it takes
is one new line of code:
use Test::LectroTest
regressions => "regressions.txt"; # <-- that's it!
See the docs on CPAN for more.
My thanks to Steffen Müller, who suggested the feature and is already
using it in cool stuff such as Number::WithError.
Slides from “Testing Tips with LectroTest” are now online
You can get the slides from my talk to the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers on
2006-06-14 here: Talk / Testing Tips with
LectroTest.
In the talk, I covered some of the newer LectroTest features, such as
regression testing and Test::LectroTest::Compat, which lets you mix
LectroTest with other Perl testing modules.
The LectroTest Emporium opens!
I have very little artistic ability. Nevertheless, alarming numbers
of people seem to love the fiercely metallic mascot I created for
LectroTest.
At the last Perl Mongers meeting, for example, people
actually told me (somewhat sternly) I should put the adorable LectroTest Robot on
t-shirts. I am now delighted to announce that I have taken their
advice:
Introducing: The LectroTest Emporium
Some important points:
- Yes, it’s a CafePress store
- I’m not making any money on these things
- I’m using direct printing, not heat-transfer printing, so
the Robot won’t crack, feel stiff, or suffer from a yellowish
transfer background. (CafePress has a comparison of the methods if you want the full details.)
Some items I have moral reservations about offering:
- LectroTest Robot Teddy Bear -
Who would be so reckless as to allow something as fierce and as powerful
as the LectroTest Robot to come into direct contact with a defenseless, cuddly
teddy bear?
- LectroTest Robot Baby Bib -
Actually, this is a great idea: your infant and the Robot
exist in a symbiotic relationship. When your baby gets food all over the
bib, the Robot will consume it (using a electrochemical process not
entirely dissimilar to our human concept of “digestion”). Thus is the
baby cleaned and the Robot fueled. It’s win-win.
- LectroTest Robot Dog T-Shirt -
I am fairly certain that the immense weight of the Robot would easily
crush any smaller animal. This product strikes me as a very bad idea.
The T-shirts, on the other hand, are the robot’s meow. Check out the
full collection at The LectroTest Emporium.
Posted in perl, fun stuff, testing, marketing, talks
Tags lectrotest, perl, testing
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Fri, 23 Jun 2006 18:56:00 GMT
Yesterday I received a new server from Dell to replace the server I
decommissioned earlier this
week.
My initial impression was favorable: the build quality looked good,
the power supply seemed up to the task, and the heat sinks and
blowers seemed almost absurdly beefy.
And then I noticed the drive bays.
Dell, doin’ it’s own thing, server style
You need to understand that Dell engineers like to do their own thing on
occasion.
Sometimes they will use power supplies that have weird mounting
configurations. Or snap-in blowers that are hard to source. Or, in
this case, drive bays that require goofy mounting hardware.
On this server there are two non-standard things about the drive bays:
- They require proprietary, snap-in drive carriers (but for
servers this is fairly common).
- They are located so close to the edge of the server’s case that
special low-profile, right-angle power and SATA data cables are
required for drive mounting. This is basically a non-stop train to
Goofy Town.
Now, here’s the head scratcher. Somebody at Dell was smart enough to
fill each of the bays with a proprietary drive carrier. That person
realized that if Dell didn’t provide the carriers, the bays were
pretty much useless, and customers would likely be upset because they
couldn’t actually use the drive bays they had just purchased as part of their shiny new servers.
Likewise, somebody was smart enough to provide the special
low-profile, right-angle power cable required for each bay. But
nobody thought to provide the special low-profile, right-angle SATA
cable required for each bay. Oops.
If it were a standard cable, I could understand the omission. In this
case, however, the cable is effectively proprietary and thus should
have been considered an essential part of the bay itself, just like
the carrier and power connecter are, and provided out of the box.
Dell’s phone support: “You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”
So I called Dell, using the phone number on my order screen, to get
the required cabling. Once Dell picked up, the problem was solved
with a simple, 17-step process, requiring only about two-and-a-half hours
in phone-maze hell:
- After phone-tree surfing, I ended up talking with Temi. She didn’t
know the part number for the cable, so she said she would have
somebody call me back.
- An hour later, Scott – in sales – called me back. He said he really
couldn’t sell me the cables because “there was essentially no resale
value to them.” But he said maybe “parts” could help me out. So he
transferred me to Manuel in the parts department.
- Manuel was able to narrow the selection down to four potential cables.
But he didn’t know which of the four I needed. So he said he would
conference in a tech specialist, who would be able to pick the right
cable.
- I ended up back at the main menu of the phone tree. Manuel
was not on the line. Oops.
- Once again, I surfed the phone tree to business customer service.
- This time I was connected to Cathy. I explained the situation.
She said she couldn’t help me but would transfer me to somebody
who could.
(At this time, I had been on the phone for one solid hour.)
- George picked up. He seemed clued in. After I explained the
situation, I could sense that he got it: It is not cool
to ship a customer a server with effectively unusable drive bays.
- Unfortunately, George said he was not the right person to take care
of the issue. (I got the feeling he was in the support group for
big-money enterprise customers and that my small company didn’t quite
make the cut.) He said he would give me the
exact phone number and extension to call to speak with the people
who could get the job done.
- When he gave me the
number, I noticed it was the same number that had been on my order
screen and had started my mad quest through Dell’s customer-support,
phone-tree hell. When I informed George of this, he seemed surprised.
In that case, he said, he would personally transfer me to a “resolution
specialist” who had the clout to get things done. Further, he
assured me, he would make sure the specialist understood the
situation before he handed off the call. Cool.
- George conferenced in Erica and briefly explained the situation.
OK, she said, she would help me out. George said goodbye, and I
thanked him.
- Erica, now in charge, asked me what I wanted her to do. I said,
figure out what the right part is, and send a shipment to me. Erica
said that she didn’t know what the right part was, but she could
transfer me to parts, and they could probably help me out. I said,
no way, I had already talked to parts – about an hour and a half ago
– and now that I was speaking with a resolution specialist I
didn’t want to be de-escalated.
- At this point, everything fell apart. Erica said that she couldn’t
get me the parts. All she could really do, in fact, was arrange for the
server to be picked up for a refund. This blew my mind.
- Staying calm, I pointed out the absurdity of the situation:
“Wouldn’t it make
more sense to conference in the right group and just have them
send me the parts? Think about it,
you just sold me the server. Now you’re telling me that the solution
is to send the server back for a refund? If I do that, it will be
as if I had not done business with Dell in the first place. Are you
absolutely certain that the best solution Dell has to offer is
effectively the same as not doing business with Dell? Doesn’t that
strike you as absurd? Aren’t you empowered to do something that
makes a little more sense, both for me and for Dell? George told
me that you were a ‘resolution specialist’ who had the power to
make things right for customers. Isn’t that the case?”
- Apparently, the situation struck somebody as absurd because at
that moment a gentleman by the name of Michael broke into the
conversation. He thanked Erica for her help and said that he would
be taking over the call.
- After Erica left the conversation, Michael explained that he and
George (from step 10) had been monitoring the conversation since
George’s hand-off, just to make sure the
situation was handled properly. Because the call seemed to be
headed in the wrong direction, they felt it was time to take
the call back and make things right themselves.
- Michael – who seemed like a no-nonsense kind of guy – said
that he was going to find out what I needed, make sure it was
in stock, and get it to me. And that’s exactly what he did.
In about three minutes, he had confirmed the part number of
the correct cabling, verified that it was in stock,
and then handed the call over to George,
who (1) arranged for the shipment, (2) gave it some kind of insane
priority that he said would get it fulfilled before the shift
change in the next hour,
and (3) got me a tracking number. I thanked George for his help,
and he gave me his direct line, just in case I ever needed it.
- Problem solved.
All in all, I am not happy with Dell’s support. Even though Michael and George kicked ass on behalf of this customer – note to Dell: you need more guys like them – it was too late to undo the damage caused by nearly two hours of ineffective prior support.
I have some more thoughts that I will share later, especially regarding the comparative merits of HP’s support.
Until then, does anybody have any other entertaining phone-support tales to tell?
Update:
See
Dell-support follow-up survey
to read about how my problems with Dell support ended up getting the attention of a business magazine and Dell headquarters.
Posted in hardware, business
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Sun, 18 Jun 2006 20:44:00 GMT
Around my garden, there is no greater hero than the larva of the lady beetle. They patrol my garden and eat the nasty aphids that otherwise would suck the life from my plants, especially my precious tomatoes.
Today, I got some good shots of one crawling around on a Spirea japonica ‘Little Princess.’ For perspective, the larva is the size of a large grain of rice.
Lady-beetle larva
Ain’t she cute?
Posted in photography
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Sat, 17 Jun 2006 22:49:00 GMT
My blog and the Community Projects site were down for about twelve hours yesterday. Both were hosted on one of my few non-RAID servers. As happens to servers from time to time, the poor beast suffered a hard-drive failure.
After a bit of diagnosing, I decided to decommission the server rather than repair it. Keeping a non-RAID system going isn’t worth the effort these days. Hard drives fail too often, and restoring from backup is too time consuming.
Most of downed server’s duties are now handled by one of its beefier, RAID-served brethren. I have opted not to move some of the low-priority services (e.g., the LectroTest mailing list) over just now. A new server should be arriving in a few days, and it will make a more logical home for these jobs.
Posted in site news
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Fri, 16 Jun 2006 12:21:00 GMT
In Port Scanning Shootout, author “cavedave” provides a mini-review of my Concurrent port scanner in Haskell. The thing is, I am not sure what to make of it:
50 lines of indentation balancing monadic grappling goodness. Considering I started this quest after seeing this code and thinking it was good, in retrospect it seems very big and not very clever, or at least so clever as to be stupid.
I am struck by the last statement. It seems the author is
channeling the timeless David St. Hubbins, who said,
“It’s such a fine line between stupid, and clever.”
Words to live by, if you ask me. ;-)
Posted in programming, functional programming, haskell, humor
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Wed, 07 Jun 2006 17:29:00 GMT
At the 2006 Red Hat Summit, Eben Moglen and Cory Doctorow gave interesting keynote talks on freedom and software. Videos of both talks are available from the Summit’s video-download page.
Eben Moglen’s talk was like a locomotive, starting slowly but building to an impressive momentum. He argued (effectively) that free and open-source software are not expressions of strange, un-American ideas, as vendors of proprietary software would have the world believe. Rather, he argued, the ideas behind free software – in particular the harnessing of “individual ingenuity” – are the same ideas that made America so successful.
Cory Doctorow’s talk put DRM into perspective. Starting in the past with sheet music, he traced how each generation of the entertainment industry fought to preserve its dying business models in the face of the emerging competition, often by labeling the new competition as “pirates.” These “pirates” eventually became the new entertainment industry, which in turn labeled future-competitors as – you guessed it – “pirates.”
For example, the phonograph-record people were said to “pirate” sheet music because they would record live performances, frequently of published sheet music, and sell the recordings, making sheet music largely unnecessary. While this situation was indeed bad for the publishers of sheet music, the phonograph “pirates” launched a new, larger, more-profitable industry – the record industry – which copyright law was eventually adjusted to recognize. And so on for radio, broadcast television, cable television, the VCR.
But Cory warned that DRM is not merely the next step in that progression but a whole new evil that threatens to eliminate free and open-source software as a way to interact with media. In fact, he argued, DRM ultimately threatens to control how we live. (He gave some interesting examples.) How to fight it? Cory asked that you join the EFF.
Both talks are worth checking out. If you’re short on time, play them back at 200-percent speed; both are understandable at that rate.
Posted in privacy, talks, freedom
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