To be fair, I rarely have a good experience calling toll-free customer service numbers for any company. But in the hour and a half that I spent on the phone with Dell, I spoke to about ten different people, listened to an hour of hold music, repeated my customer number, my order number, my address, my return authorization number, my purchase ID number, my phone number, and my computer's service tag number at least two dozen times total, and spelled out my name another dozen times. I got blackmailed into staying the phone with one person eager to make a sale and was commanded to get off of my headset (I'm not kidding — one guy literally yelled at me to get off my headset because he couldn't hear me) by another. At the end of the day, I was left with no idea whether I could exchange my 6-cell for a 3-cell and a conviction that these Dell customer service reps must be unhappy, untrained, underpaid, or all of the above.
Now boing boing has about a million readers. Nice job Dell! Let's face it - we have come to accept that "customer service department" means "customer dissatisfaction department.
It does not need to be this way.
