Lock it Up

After spending much of the weekend distilling a 290 page research report on food trends, just when I thought I was almost finished, my PowerPoint crashed. Since it happens all the time (and I've learned my lesson), I had been saving every few minutes. In this case, I only lost 5-6 slides. Other times, I haven't been so lucky.

Coincidentally, in the office mail I just received the June/July 2009 Dell business catalog with the following headline (in screaming all caps).

IT'S YOUR BUSINESS. LOCK IT UP.

Sheesh. What marketing genius thought of that?! When I think of PCs and locking up, it's never a good thing.

Worse yet, prior to my long-standing issues with Home Depot, I had Dell-related problems and solutions. By problems, I mean a laptop that crashed 6X/day. By solutions, I mean purchasing a new Dell (seriously, what was I thinking?) and, thankfully, Dell not processing the order.

Following is a portion of the letter I wrote to Dell and sent to myriad muckety mucks without a single response. Ever.

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On August 13, 2004, a co-worker ordered a Dell notebook computer on my behalf. It never arrived. In fact, seven weeks later, it still hasn’t arrived. To this date, we have never received any contact from anyone at Dell.

Please take a moment to review the following event log of my co-worker’s actions on my behalf:

• August 13: Notebook ordered online through the Dell.com small business site.
• August 13: Immediately received an “Order Acknowledgement” email.
• August 23: No computer. Called customer service. After much discussion, was told that we needed to deal with our account representative. (As e-commerce “customers,” we did not know that we had a designated account representative.)
• August 23: Was told that our account representative was not in at the moment but would respond within the day.
• August 24: Sent e-mail to the Dell Online Communications Center describing the problem (see attached).
• August 25: Received a short, but prompt, “customer care does not have access to Sales data” response (again, see attached).
• September 24: Still waiting by the phone for our account rep—but not anxiously as I have been using my new IBM ThinkPad since August 27.
  

Is it the customer’s responsibility to know that a SKU presented on your site is not valid? If your e-commerce system rejects an order that has already been acknowledged to the customer, is no one notified either internally or externally? Was no one empowered and/or incented to take action? Is it possible that no one at Dell wanted or needed our order? At the very least, would it have been difficult for someone to acknowledge that a problem had occurred? Conversely, would it be ludicrous to hope that someone might take the initiative to cross functional barriers (from customer care to sales) and proactively meet our needs? Quite simply, is there anything that could have been done to facilitate our transaction?

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So much for my non-complaining. I bring this years-old issue up because earlier this year, after five years of peace and tranquility with my IBM ThinkPad, I got a new Dell laptop that our IT vendor purchased on my behalf (against my better judgment). Well, what do you know? It keeps crashing. I've had our vendor's help desk people looking into the problems, running diagnostics, etc.

IT'S YOUR BUSINESS. LOCK IT UP.

Finally, it's a refreshing change of pace to see a tagline that is brutally honest!