Customer Experience (CX) : What Dell could possibly learn from Amazon but probably won’t!

I am going to talk about 2 customer experiences that I personally had, one with Dell (Alienware) and the other with Amazon, in the post below.

Amazon gets ★★★★★ while Dell (Alienware) gets ★

Curious as to why? Read on!

I bought an Alienware 13 R3 gaming PC (Service Tag : 6SHK3H2) from Dell during the September COMEX IT show in Singapore.

It happens to be one of the top of the line gaming laptop configurations in a 13 inch form factor. It comes with a Intel i7 quadcore 7th generation, 16 GB RAM , Nvidia 1060, a bright QHD panel and a M.2 NVME hard disk….in one word a “beast”.

But I got a lemon. The laptop started running up temperatures upwards of 90 degree Celcius on modest usage. I even got a Blue Screen of Death a few times. Being a technology professional myself, I know that these things can happen… that’s what the warranty service is for, after all !

I contacted Dell Support. Imagine my surprise when I was told that it is normal behavior for Alienware laptops to reach temperatures of 90 degrees. I could not believe that. So I asked other pc enthusiasts on online forums and on their advice downloaded some tools like HWInfo and measured the temperature and CPU performance. And know what? The CPU was indeed throttling (degrading in performance) whenever the temperature reached 90 degrees. Armed with the screenshots I went back to Dell support and requested them to explain if it was normal for Alienware laptop CPUs to throttle under modest loads.

Dell had no answer this time, so they sent a technician down after a week. He arrived on a Monday and replaced the heat sink, motherboard and the memory modules on my brand new laptop. I was happy at least the CPU throttling problem would be addressed now. Boy was I wrong!

Fast forward to Saturday. I was playing “Civilisation 5“ on my recently fixed laptop . For those of you who are not gaming enthusiasts, Civ 5 is a pretty modest and old game which is not at all CPU/GPU intensive like some of the modern First Person Shooter games. Within an hour, I heard static noise from the laptop and the motherboard short circuited. The whole thing shut down and would not turn on when the power button is pressed. I immediately logged a ticket with Dell. When I called them on Monday, I requested them to replace my laptop with a new set as clearly I had received a set which is a "lemon". Dell insisted on not replacing the system and wanted to have one more shot at repairing it. They kept saying that this time they would send a senior technician who would do the parts replacement properly so that there is no issue. I politely reminded the support agent that this is leading me to have a very bad customer experience after having purchased a top of the line gaming laptop but she said she cannot help, it is company policy not to replace laptops without many layers of approvals. And she refused to let me speak to her supervisor or an escalation contact. After lots of back and forth for a week, and reminding Dell that Singapore has a “Lemon Law” which protects consumers like me from being ripped off when they purchase a faulty appliance, Dell finally agreed to give me a replacement unit. Now here is the catch, the replacement unit would take more than a month to be assembled and sent to me. I requested Dell if they could possibly send it to me quicker….. the answer was a curt “NO”. Then I asked them if they would extend my original warranty by a month considering that I would be without a laptop for more than a month. The answer? Surprise, surprise. A even more rude “NO”!

Contrast this with a recent experience at Amazon. I bought a TPLink Archer 5400 high end WiFi router from them. The router stopped working within a week and the local Singapore warranty centre would not honor the warranty as it was bought from Amazon (US). I contacted Amazon hoping that they could somehow convince the vendor to provide me warranty service in Singapore. Their response surprised me (pleasantly!) Firstly, they profusely apologized for the bad experience that I had. They appreciated the fact that the loss of use of a new product could be very disruptive and they offered to ship me a replacement right away. They upgraded the shipping to priority so that I can have the router within 3 days in Singapore. Not only that, they also agreed to pay return postage for the defective item. Now, that’s what I would call a terrific customer experience. I have been buying from Amazon since 1999, and they continue to surprise me again and again with good service.

Mr. Michael Dell, sir, may I humbly request you to please get your leadership team to buy more stuff from Amazon and check out the fine service that they are offering to their customers? And, then you may want to gently nudge your very own customer service team to do something about it :-)