5 Stars for Dell’s Technical Support

I had been noticing some strange symptoms from my Dell Inspiron 6400 for a couple of weeks now. It sort of pauses at the bootup and took a longer time to boot up. Then the inevitable happened – when I booted yesterday morning, opened up Firefox and tried to type in a URL, it automatically typed in “,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,” and kept on running like the key was stuck or something. Then it went away after I pressed some other keys, but the “,” key (or the “<" key) no longer worked. Imagine typing a paragraph without this most important key! I had to use the virtual On-Screen keyboard on Windows XP as temporary replacement.

I called up Dell Singapore and was conversing with a guy named Joe soon enough. He duly informed me that it is unfortunate that my warranty had just expired. Expired? I looked at my invoice and told him it cannot be, since the invoice says 4/6/06 and I really believed that I bought it in June last year. Then I realised it is actually in the MM/DD/YY format and sheepishly accepted that the warranty had expired. Joe was quick to assure me that since it is only a matter of days, he can waive the charges this time, and he advised me to renew the maintenance if I want future support. How nice. Joe proceeded to get me to perform a series of diagnostic tests, and he noted the error codes and messages that I read back to him. I was thinking to myself that he is lucky I am familiar with hard reboots and BIOS stuff like these. Joe then told me he will arrange for a technical support guy to come down to my office to have it fixed, and that I can give him a call before the day ends if no one calls me up to fix the appointment. I took down his number and the case number as reference.

I actually made a call back to Dell after 4pm yesterday because no one had contacted me. I was then assured by this other lady that Joe had indeed arranged for the onsite-maintenance, but due to the lag in getting the parts, the technical person had not given me a call. Later in the evening around 8pm, I got a call confirming the appointment between 4-6pm the next day.

I was out of my office this afternoon, but the service person arrived promptly even before 4pm. He quickly asked me over the phone about the specific key that was giving the problem, fixed it and tested the laptop before leaving my office. I believe he fixed it within less than half an hour and I had my laptop back in action. Less than 2 hours later, my newfound buddy Joe called me again to follow up and ask if I everything was fine. He asked me on a scale of 1 to 10, how do I rate the service and I replied with a smile “10″. How to fault this level of service?