A little over a month ago I bought a laptop from Dell. The laptop was assembled in Nashville TN and shipped to me in Louisville KY (if you don't know where those two cities are, I invite you to use any of the online map services).
Dell of course shipped the laptop via DHL — to turned a one day drive from Nashville to Louisville into a week-long oddessy while they bounced my laptop around two different facilities in Ohio and faked an "attempted delivery" before I finally got my laptop.
After I complained loudly to both DHL and Dell, I received both email and telephone assurances from Dell that I could get future orders without having them shipped via DHL.
In May, I ordered another Dell laptop and a mouse. Dell decided they would ship the mouse separately, with a projected ship date more than a week earlier than the laptop.
The ship date for the mouse came — and Dell "delayed" the shipment giving a new projected ship date a week later (but still earlier than the laptop).
Today I checked the status on line and it said the order was "changed" (with no explanation of what was changed). The website gave a 800 number to call to find out what "changed" so I called the number. After wading through several layers of voice prompt menus I finally got someone in customer service (obviously overseas despite a fake American name) who first told me that the order was cancelled, not changed. Then told me that orders are never cancelled without notifying the customer; but that her system showed that my order was cancelled and did not show anything about anyone attempting to contact me. Her system also showd that my mouse had been cancelled for "incompatible configuration" meaning that the mouse I ordered (from Dell's website) was not compatible with the laptop I ordered (it was the mouse that Dell sells for this laptop when you order it online). After more than a half hour on the phone to get this much information, the girl offered to find the part number for the right mouse so I could reorder. Fifteen minutes later she had figured out that the part number for a wireless laptop mouse for a Dell Vostro laptop was the same number that they had just cancelled. She then transferred me to "Sales" for them to fix the problem.
At Sales I got someone who finally admitted that the order for the mouse had been cancelled because the shipping instructions were "Not DHL" and that wasn't allowed. (Keep in mind that Dell had had the order for over a week, had delayed it once, and had now cancelled it - all without bothering to contact the customer; and all without also canceling the order for the laptop itself which was also listed the same way "Not DHL")
I asked the Sales guy for his supervisor, so he transferred me to Dell's so-called Customer Care (not his supervisor), we went through the same nonsense all over again (now the third time) before the "Customer Care" lady passed me to her supervisor — who assured me that no one could do anything about it because the computers are shipped by "Manufacturing" and "Customer Care" wasn't allowed to talk with Manufacturing.
His best (HA!) idea was that he could annotate the order for Customer Care to keep track of the order and keep track of the shipment so they would know where my package was at all times. When I pointed out that this did not give them any control over the shipment he eventually admitted that it was really just the same tracking information that any customer would have available on the DHL website (the same way that I had watched my previous laptop bounced between two DHL facilities in Ohio and watched when DHL said that they had "attempted delivery" while we were home).
By then I had been on the phone with Dell for one hour and twenty minutes and I had to leave for a meeting. The so-called "Customer Care" so-called "supervisor" was supposed to find out who had authority to do something and call me back — of course he never did call back.
Update:
And now, Dell has delayed the order TWICE, and I still don't have the laptop that I ordered in May — but I do have a whole collection of emails from different specialists at Dell all of whom apologize for the problems, but none of whom can manage to do something as simple as getting Dell to put a laptop in a box and actually ship it.
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