Now that I no longer work for Dell, I can reveal the secrets to getting good tech support. Note: Most of these are only true for Dell, but some can be used with any company.
First, and most import rule: Buy as a company. Even if you claim to be a company with only one employee, you’ll be treated much better. Things tend to be cheaper because there are no faux discounts. The North American call centers are reserved for companies that buy in bulk, but if their queue drops down, small business sometimes gets shifted over. Dell just don’t care about personal buyers.
There is one reason to buy as an individual: extended service hours. Small businesses don’t get service at night or weekends. If you can’t take time off of work, you need to buy the individual’s extended warranty.
Now this is only true for Dell. Lenovo and Apple don’t have separate plans for home and office. I can’t speak for any other maker, but Dell seems to be the only one that is willing to alienate home customers.
Second: Try diagnostics before calling. All computer makers provide something so the phone support person doesn’t have to do any work. With Dell, it’s a DVD called “Drivers and Diagnostics”. When you first start your computer, press F12 to bring up the boot menu. Insert the DVD and select “Boot from DVD/CD”. It will ask you to press 1 a bunch of times before it actually starts loading. From there you should be able to figure it out.
If you didn’t get a “Drivers and Diagnostics” DVD with your computer, it means you broke the first rule and Dell doesn’t like you.
Most computer makers also provide something similar. The DVD is sometimes called “Recovery” or “Restore”, but trying to diagnose a hardware problem over the phone with an amateur is nearly impossible. Getting the error codes from a program is much less error prone. If you can start the conversation with that error code, makes everything go faster.
Third: They won’t call you back. At the beginning of the call they always ask you for “your phone number in case we get disconnected”. This is a lie. You should give them a permanent phone number. The phone number you give them will be your phone number for the life of the computer. If you have to call in a year later and no longer have that phone number, tough shit. Correcting contact information for a call was always a challenge. I can’t tell you the number of times I got a bad phone number and was unable to get it fixed. I was once written up for talking back to a phone tech that gave me a phone number with only 9 digits. I once got the phone number for a dorm room where the actual user had moved out the year before.
A corollary is to always give an alternate phone number. You’re trusting someone with a heavy accent to take down a number correctly. Give them another to minimize the chances of failure. Even if you have to give your mother’s cell phone, always give a second number.
I’m posting this because I’ve got some issues to work out from my last job. This is all good information, but I just want to forget it. Next up: forgiving my boss for being a passive-agressive lier. It’ll take some time.