Technical Support Dell and the Failed Hard

Technical Support

Dell and the Failed Hard Drive in a New Laptop

During the December, 2010 sales at BestBuy, the deals on the Dell laptops were just too good to pass up. I bought one on impulse, reasoning my laptop running Windows 3.1 was a dinosaur and would not be able to keep up with the applications I was going to need to run doing this semester. For the first two weeks, the system ran perfectly, and then on the eleventh day, it died. Just quit working, the hard drive had crashed, right after I had loaded all my application on it. Incredulous, I had to pull myself from continually rebooting it until the realization set in": it was completely dead.

Analysis of Technical Support

Having saved the materials from the package, I immediately went online on my parents' laptop and typed in my serial number, reporting the system broken. Dell had done an excellent job of ensuring there were multiple channels for getting support, which was a welcome change from previous manufacturers who only had telephone technical support (Fox, 2009). An e-mail immediately arrived back (auto-generated) giving me a tracking number and also specifics of how to troubleshoot the system more. The e-mail gave a series of instructions of how to troubleshoot the system more, and I dutifully completed each step. Still, nothing was working.

Next, the online guided technical support Wizard looked as if it would help decipher the codes that were coming back from the testing I was doing. The use of guided technical support applications is based on the logic used in the Myers-Briggs types of personality tests and guides customers through a series of options for troubleshooting their problems (Mies, 2009). Based on the code received from the tests it was clear my laptop had a blink disk drive.

As a final check, I called technical support from Dell. It took about three to five tries to get through to the technicians. An Indian young man answered the call and took me through a series of questions on the system I had. After we found out it was a Seagate drive with a specific model and serial number (he told me how to pop the back cover to see this information) he said that an entire batch of drives were failing this month from this manufacturer. He said Dell was aware of this glitch in quality of the drive and gave me a specific 800 number in Round Rock, Texas to call and they would Federal Express a new drive to me and I would be able to send back the defective one. He asked if I had any additional questions or comments and we ended the call.

What had happened was that Dell had decided to retrofit all drives in the field immediately and replace them as quickly as possible. This retrofit had been designed to get the new PCs up and running as fast as possible to save the company from losing new customer. That was obvious from how quickly the moved on this problem with a FedEx package and return materials. The use of tech support call centers to escalate retrofits in the field is becoming common as manufacturers battle for more customers (Rhey, 2007).