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Mention the words "customer service" to pretty much anyone on the street, and you can be sure that they'll have a story, or horror story, to tell. I haven't personally experienced any real major issue with customer service in the past, but since I did at one point own a Dell notebook, I did get to taste how frustrating it can be at times. With Dell in particular, they outsource to India for most of their customer service, and while I'm all for people having a job, customers really shouldn't be expected to deal with someone who's native language is clearly not English.
UK publication PC Pro decided to see how things stand today with a couple of major PC sellers, Dell and Mesh, and in particular, see how much they could be ripped off. They posed as a regular consumer... one who isn't that well-versed in technology, to see if they could purchase a PC that was best-suited for them. In the end, both companies tried to upsell this faux consumer, while making some outrageous claims at the same time.
One Dell employee, for example, stated that a better graphics card was required to download photos. When the consumer stated that his max spending limit was £599, the machine that the representative came up with was of course £599. When another rep was asked about the number of photos that could be stored on a 250GB hard drive, the response was, "In other words is it [sic] around 10 lakh. 1000*250.". Don't worry... I didn't know that lakh meant "one hundred thousand" in the Indian numbering system either.
Mesh as a whole was a lot better in giving advice, but they still tried to upsell. In truth, while Dell and Mesh may try to upsell whatever you're looking to buy, it's hardly only these two companies that are guilty of this. It's unfortunate, because most people aren't even going to realize that they are being ripped off by buying into a bigger computer than they actually need. It pays to do your research... if only more consumers realized this.
Hold on sunshine. What about these cheap netbook devices I've seen Dell advertise in my daily newspaper? Are these not good enough? "They are netbooks and not laptops," he snapped back. What's the difference? "The netbooks comes [sic] with a slower processor, lesser memory, lesser hard drive, no optical drive and it would not be possible to have any software loaded on this netbook," he stated, once again playing hard and fast with the truth.
<table border="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td>Source: PC Pro</td> <td>
</td></tr></tbody></table>
UK publication PC Pro decided to see how things stand today with a couple of major PC sellers, Dell and Mesh, and in particular, see how much they could be ripped off. They posed as a regular consumer... one who isn't that well-versed in technology, to see if they could purchase a PC that was best-suited for them. In the end, both companies tried to upsell this faux consumer, while making some outrageous claims at the same time.
One Dell employee, for example, stated that a better graphics card was required to download photos. When the consumer stated that his max spending limit was £599, the machine that the representative came up with was of course £599. When another rep was asked about the number of photos that could be stored on a 250GB hard drive, the response was, "In other words is it [sic] around 10 lakh. 1000*250.". Don't worry... I didn't know that lakh meant "one hundred thousand" in the Indian numbering system either.
Mesh as a whole was a lot better in giving advice, but they still tried to upsell. In truth, while Dell and Mesh may try to upsell whatever you're looking to buy, it's hardly only these two companies that are guilty of this. It's unfortunate, because most people aren't even going to realize that they are being ripped off by buying into a bigger computer than they actually need. It pays to do your research... if only more consumers realized this.
Hold on sunshine. What about these cheap netbook devices I've seen Dell advertise in my daily newspaper? Are these not good enough? "They are netbooks and not laptops," he snapped back. What's the difference? "The netbooks comes [sic] with a slower processor, lesser memory, lesser hard drive, no optical drive and it would not be possible to have any software loaded on this netbook," he stated, once again playing hard and fast with the truth.
<table border="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td>Source: PC Pro</td> <td>
</td></tr></tbody></table>
