Simplify, Simplify!!
Sales Strategies, Simplify IT submitted by beefman
02/23/07 **PARTIALLY IMPLEMENTED**
Purchasing from Dell at present is immensely confusing. From home buyers to corporate purchases, simply purchasing a computer is a struggle when one is trying to achieve the best value. In the drive to serve every segment of the market, Dell has become balkanized and fragmented.
Dell made their name on ease of transaction and simplicity. Now, Dell's pricing structure is so complex it makes airline fares look simple! Then, when it comes time to order, finding the right person to speak to can be a chore as well. I have been able to make much better deals when talking to a sales rep than when ordering online. Why? Dell should be driving customers to the lowest cost method of order acceptance and making that process as easy and painless as possible.
The multilayered, multitiered pricing structure has to be the first thing to go. Get rid of the thousands of discount codes that are handed out on a by the minute basis. Make pricing simple, repeatable and logical. Discount by customer on an account basis. Why should you be extending discounts and rewarding a bottom-feeder who only waits for below-cost red-ink loss leaders and never buys otherwise? Reward good customers, and set pricing such that even without a discount, Dell products are an excellent value. All the segmentation DOES NOT result in better service to customers and only adds cost.
On that note: DON'T hand off accounts. My biggest frustration with Dell was building a relationship and then being handed off to someone else to work with. It seemed that this was done on a regular basis to stimulate business. Not smart. I have had the same rep at CDW for 8 years. They're my primary vendor and I won't go anywhere else. If they sold Dell, I'd buy it there. Why? My sales rep and the quality of service.
You NEVER want customers having buyers remorse or thinking they could've got a better deal. The sales/pricing structure in place pretty much assures that, in addition to making the purchase process more difficult than it should be. Sweep it away, get back to roots of offering rock solid leading edge technology at a rock bottom price.
We’re making every effort to simplify the purchase process for Dell products and services. The recent launch of Dell ProSupport was driven by feedback from customers like you, and it’s an important step in the right direction.
930
Dell, a global player with global service & solutions? Yes & No ...
Service and Support, Simplify IT submitted by xaerts
03/02/07 **PARTIALLY IMPLEMENTED**
I work in a multinational with offices all around the globe. As IT Manager for the Europe region (15 offices) I am a bit dissapointed in the way that Dell cannot organise a better Global program or even a regional program.
And yes I know all about premier pages and we had meetings all over the globe with Dell and Dell International Business Consultants.
For the EMEA region it comes down to this:
Many countries have their own keyboard type and power plug types. Dell can deliver that straight from the factory, great, I love that! That's something you can't accomplish with IBM ThinkPads etc.
Now we order everything through an account manager in the UK who can ship our orders to the local offices all over Europe with the correct keyboard layouts etc. At least we accomplished that! Two years ago that was not even possible. (shipping to Poland is still not possible, but ok, at least the 14 other offices are sorted this way)
The problem is that we cannot have this setup through a corporate premier page, so all orders go by phone/e-mail. We have poor tracking and history reporting because of that.
An even bigger issue is that the UK can only accept orders in GBP and invoice to one address in the UK. And that's the big pain! All invoices go to our office in London who then need to rebill all the other offices throughout Europe and convert it to EUR, SEK, ...
I wish Dell could just get us an Premier Page where all orders are taken and the billing is done though Dell local branches to the office who requested the equipment. That would be a huge cost saver for us (time/resources).
It also is a little silly that for instance Brussels needs a printer toner, we need to go through the UK to order a toner, have it shipped from Ireland to Brussels. All the hassles for just a toner. Calling Dell locally does not help, as we only have a UK Dell account and we are considered to be NO client of Dell for the local offices.
Alternatively working with local Dell reps doesn't work either as we loose our volume discount agreements.
What we like about Dell is mostly the price/quality and the delivery lead times. Support is ok, but also here some improvement/remarks.
In the US it seems like you need to be Dell Certified to place a support call, in EU luckily not (yet).
Please Dell, make a better difference between professional customers and consumers. None of our offices have local IT staff! We have a centralised helpdesk. If a PC dies in Germany and we do the troubleshooting and we say it is a thermal event on the motherboard, it is a thermal event. Then the nightmare begins; the local office (mostly woman) need to call Dell Support in their local country and they start to ask to open up the PC and do this or that.
Our Helpdesk cannot place the call as we are not physically in front of the PC/laptop to do the requested things by Dell Support. Neither do we speak the local language of the Dell Support team in the country where we have an issue.
I would love to have an international number where IT people can contact Dell to report a fault on a machine in ANY location. Dell will need to trust the knowledge of the clients IT team and dispatch a local tech to fix the issue.
Who knows my posting gets on the desk of M. Dell !
Best regards
X.A.
Belgium
Check out our latest Idea in Action
100
Clearly Understandable English & Don't Treat all callers as "idiots"
Service and Support submitted by hipowerone
05/07/07 **PARTIALLY IMPLEMENTED**
As a PC consultant, Dell Owner, and often user of Dell Support, I encourage Dell to require that "any" support personnel be able to demonstrate that they can speak and be clearly understood in English, or any other language, as a requirement for employment by either Dell or off site support facilities.
I am tired of having Dell customers give up on Dell when they try to call Dell Tech support. It is because they get techs who truly try to speak English, but their native tongue and dialect prevent what comes out from being recognized as English.
What took the cake for me in this matter was a customer who had paid for a business Latitude along with 4 year support. I was called in to handle a warranty issue (back light dead). I called Dell Support and got a "foreign" English student for support. Supposedly he was located somewhere in Canada(???). I spoke slowly and repeatedly enunciated what I wanted and repeatedly told him to slow down and repeat himself for each question he asked, just to understand what he said.
Secondly, get rid of the scripts. All callers are not idiots. I called clearly understanding the problem. No amount of talking could draw this tech away from the script or convince him that the screen was black, period. Anything he wanted me to do or try would not bring the back light back to life or make the screen bright enough so that I could answer questions about what the computer was doing or saying.
My customer sat nearby, listening on speaker phone, as I worked my way through to the final diagnosis that indeed the back light needed to be replaced under warranty. This customer stated that the call took twice as long as necessary and she clearly would not have had the patience to work with the Dell tech. She stated that she would think twice next time she needs to buy a new computer. She did not feel that she should need to have "paid tech support" to call and talk with Dell tech support.
Check out our latest Idea in Action!
530
IMPLEMENT the INTEL PENRYN 45nm Processor on Dell's Notebook and Desktop it require less power more performance NOW!!! Dell is behind from HP
Desktops and Laptops submitted by bryan14c
Jan 9
Dell should start to sell notebook with Penryn processor because it require less power more performance
T9500 6MB L2 2.60 GHz 800 MHz
T9300 6MB L2 2.50 GHz 800 MHz
T8300 3MB L2 2.40 GHz 800 MHz
T8100 3MB L2 2.10 GHz 800 MHz
specially on the XPS line etc... , well i hope DELL would not overcharge the consumers , dell can you sell this to us right now!!! for now it seems dell is falling behind again , well they have catchup with their design but somehow they fall behind with the power inside the laptop especially the penryn processors , dell hear us now implement the PENRYN processor , your behind from HP now , if you have gone to hp website and choose the dv9700t and dv6700t model you will see that HP is getting started about the Intel Penryn T9300 6MB L2 2.50 GHz as an option, , i dont know why DELL is Behind they should implement this now!!!
   
1420
Stop mounting substandard displays on high end notebooks please...
Monitors and Displays, Laptops submitted by sergioo
Jan 15
If I go to buy a cheap notebook, I can blame me or the reasons why I have no money to buy a better one.
But if I buy a GOOD notebook, as a Dell is expecting to be, even more if a Latitude or Precision, and you put a WSXGA+ Samsung like the SEC3350, or the other WXGA+ by Auo, and I paid a high end notebook to get a sandy, oily, dirty, yellowish display, with light leakage, whites not white, blacks not black, porr colors and bad viewing angles, may I get a bit angry?
And why must I get angry and fax an angry letter to Escalation to have all solved, if it is my natural right to have a good to very good display out of the box?
Don't you realize yet how often people avoid Dell for:
1) bad displays
2) bad customer care
???
TO me it is a pity. I really like all the rest in Dell.
It is a pity...
970
Enough with the blue LED's already!
Monitors and Displays, Laptops submitted by chewd
Jan 15
A small, sharp, pinpoint of blue light is absolutely the worst thing you could possibly do to your night vision! Theres a reason the panel lights in aircraft are always red, red light does not leave retinal artifacts that impair night-vision.
I know blue LED's are trendy, everythings got them these days. And bluetooth has "blue" right in the freakin name. But those of us who use notebooks for work, and work at night, find blue LEDs very irritating.
Blue being a very short wavelength is very penetrating. You can light an entire room with one blue LED, whereas red being a long wavelength is ideal for indicators & such as it does not carry as much.
Give us the option of changing the color of the LED's either through BIOS, software, or even physically replacing them (or just replacing a colored lens). Maybe it would be possible to let us turn down the brightness a tad.
It would be nice not to have to cover my new laptop with little bits of tape.
520
switch to LED monitors
Monitors and Displays, Laptop Power submitted by yardsale
Jan 16
I dont know why dell hasnt done this yet. switch all monitors on desktops and notebooks to LED. did you know that you can run an LED screen at full brightniess and it uses less power than a LCD monitor at the lowest brighting level?!? its cheaper, its energy efficent, and it needs to be done! promote this, if you demote i wanna know why!
6140
Fix/Remove the new backdoor(s) from Vista SP1 before shipping it.
Operating Systems submitted by jmxz
12/17/07
Vista SP1 apparently has yet another new NSA backdoor; in addition to speculation of similar in XP and various other spyware features built in to Vista.
It seems that when Microsoft speaks of Vista "Security" - they're really talking about the RIAA / MPAA / Copyright laywers, and governments being secure from computer users (by giving both technical hooks as well as legalese in the EULA to let such groups go after users) rather than protecting the computer users themselves.
I imagine Dell would lose international sales if they were suspected of shipping software with government sponsored back doors; and US corporate spyware - so at least for your international sales, my Idea is that Dell should fix and/or remove these suspected backdoors before shipping.
120
Have a Fast Re-ordering Channel
Service and Support, XPS products submitted by dirtonth
12/18/07
I have just received my XPS 1330 after waiting for it for 12 Weeks.
When I orederred it the first time it came after 5 weeks as it was delayed because it seems that Laptop Displays had been out of stock at the mounting stage, and when I received it, the cover was Crimson Red, instead of Tuxedo Black as I had orderred it. The Service Tag also said that it should be Black even though it wasn't. This was definitely a case of a mistake in the production line, but Dell did not accept to make a Fast re-order.
On the next delivery, the product was stolen in transit, and since I purchased the Item from Dell's Local authorised reseller, Dell did not accept it as a corporate problem, but as the distributers problem, and here again, a new full order had to be placed.
I think Dell should have a channel to make fast re-orders in case of such happenings.
180
Don't totally disable editing ideas.
IdeaStorm submitted by jmxz
08/23/07
In some comment somewhere dell_admin1 suggested that editing of ideas would be disabled.
While I understand something is needed to prevent vandalism, editing of Ideas is very useful. In particular, soon after an idea is posted there are frequently questions in the comments and related ideas that are discussed that refine the Ideas in a very positive way.
There are a number of Ideas where I voted against them -- and in the comments explained why I voted against them -- and as a result the submitter edited-and-refined the Idea to make what was a problematic idea into a very positive one. The "include software disks" is one example - I think it's a great optional idea - but horrible for the environment if it's done by default(as the idea was originally posted where it said "always include").
By disallowing editing Ideas you would lose the benefits of having the community refine ideas and turning them from Good Ideas into Great Ideas.
Better solutions -- any one of: - Disable editing only after, say, 30-days after an Idea is posted.
- Allow editing - but make Editing clear the vote scores for an Idea.
- Allow editing as you do now - I only saw 1 instance of abuse of this feature and many instances of productive use of it.
[EDIT - As pointed out in the comments - there's another good solution - - Still allow edits but the edits need to be approved by moderators (dell_admins? trusted users?) before going into effect
Also, as pointed out in the comments - good thing I can still edit the Idea to get this good additional solution on the table.]
250
Improve the DELL XPS 1530 this 2008 to attract more consumers that love DELL's Laptop
XPS products submitted by bryan14c
12/13/07
Well the specs of the currrent xps 1530 is quite good but it lacks something, DELL consider another option about the screen resolution and WLED and also it lacks 1 USB not like inspiron 1520 it has 4 USB ports i think you should put 4 USB Ports, also the Speakers i think you should put some nice speakers on it like HP done to their pavilion line maybe you should team up with BOSE or LOGITECH or CREATIVE , and also improve your touch sensitive media buttons and i have heard many complaints about the xps 1330 slot load optical drive ,well i don't know if this problem is with an 1530 also , I'm Planning to buy one but it seems that the DELL XPS 1530 right now has a lack of features but well over all its a Very Good Nice Design , and also make the DELL logo at the back of the screen Glow put some led lights on it so that there is kind of touch that you had an XPS laptop like the high end model that it has some lights on the Logo, and the aluminum brushed finish i think you must improve it might consider another material. i hope you should also consider the tuxedo black color to be a GLOSSY FINISH like the HP pavilion , but maintain the design with silver lines as well as it will be glossy also, well over all a Dell has a nice and a Very Good Product and i hope they will apply some of ideas i talk about , the last thing is that Please change the Color of the remote maybe design a remote that its only on a XPS line because the color is boring, well keep it up dell and i hope you will apply this on your DELL XPS 1530 this coming 2008 o hope there is an improvement
690
An open solution to categorization
IdeaStorm submitted by cosh
05/08/07
This was originally posted on May 8. Lots of people were saying IdeaStorm was cluttered, and that spam and duplicates were appearing, that we needed better categories and a search engine that returns better results, and that it was taking too long to get bug fixes and improvements.
I built a new system, a mirror of every idea on the site, to try and sort it out myself, and to demonstrate to Dell that when everybody is complaining, improvements should happen in days, not months.
It has a better search engine than IdeaStorm, and the ability to browse ideas based on the Dell-assigned tags. As well as demonstrating good potential features for IdeaStorm, it should prove useful as it is.
The link:» » New IdeaStorm Categorizer « «
Initially I was trying to get people to help sort the ideas into categories, but I'm considering adding a robot to sort the rest of them out automatically. Thanks very much to people who helped categorize ideas!
540
Improve backorder info
Service and Support submitted by mls
12/11/07
I ordered an inexpensive printer from Dell about a month ago. Shipping has now been delayed a couple of times with the only explanation being that it is on backorder.
This doesn't make a lot of sense. At the time of the order it had already been replaced by a new model so I'd assumed they were just clearing out the inventory of the old model. It is hardly like it was a new model where the product announcement might have gotten ahead of production capability.
To the point, trying to get any info beyond "backordered" has been a futile effort. While people have been very polite, it is pretty clear that they have no useful info and that my options are either to shut up and wait or cancel. Reminds me of trying to get information regarding flight delays out of an airline - just an exercise in frustration.
My suggestion is to improve the quality of detail available when shipments have been delayed. There has certainly been nothing impressive or useful about this experience.
200
A contrast - HOW TO DO Customer Satisfaction Phone Survey's
Dell, Service and Support submitted by phubert
11/30/07
Moments ago, I received a 'Customer Satisfaction' phone call from IBM regarding service a few days before.
The caller was pleasant and natural-sounding. It did not sound as though she was reading from a script.
The survey was NOT lengthy.
I was told AT THE BEGINNING to use "Very Satisfied, Satisfied, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, Unsatisfied or Very Unsatisfied" in my responses. I was NOT given the categories with EVERY QUESTION (as the Dell survey has done).
The caller gave the date of the service, the call number, and a summary of the problem, clearly identifying the event.
The tone was conversational, NOT mechanical, and the survey ended with the caller asking me to describe why I had given the rating I had.
The IBM call was PLEASANT, the Dell calls have been tedious and annoying.
Elsewhere I have suggested Dell offer an ONLINE survey... and did so BECAUSE their phone surveys were so annoying.
IBM has provided me with an example of how a phone survey COULD be done... perhaps Dell could follow it?
160
Improve Dell's support center
Dell, Dell Web Site, Service and Support, Software, Simplify IT submitted by liraco
11/30/07
I'm happy with my new Dell Vostro but was very disappointed when I upgraded the Dell Support Center that claimed it was better integrated to improve support. I then went to see if there were new drivers and updates for the computer.
To my dismay, the site has tons of upgrades and all are much older than what my laptop currently has. There's no indication that reveals that, my windows system caught on to me installing an older driver though.
If you really want to make support easier and integrating it with the hardware, then make sure the software know what's already on and show only the things you need (with an option to see older drivers not on by default). Also upgrade the sites drivers faster. How is it my laptop has all its components nwered than what's on the site? That shouldn't be.
310
program an update agent
Service and Support submitted by maguu
12/03/07
I wonder if it is possible by dell to write a small program that identifies the computer I use than connect to the dell website and fetch the latest drivers and installs them?!?
I don't want to click through the dell website to find out that a new bios is available!
310
 track my votes
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