I know I was trans­ferred 6 times and more than half of them were need­less and useless.

I know that numb­ing pain grad­u­ally crept up my left arm with each suc­ces­sive transfer.

I know I was sold the wrong ser­vice package.

I know I shut the board­room door because I was start­ing to lose my cool and didn’t want peo­ple walk­ing by to think they should call the ambu­lance to bring a straight jacket.

I know in my frus­tra­tion I resorted to Twit­ter and all of a sud­den with one tweet my prob­lems started to melt away.

Twit­ter?

My real prob­lems are not tech­ni­cal in nature. Sure, there is either a dri­ver or reg­istry prob­lem that needs to be taken care of, if not some­thing more com­plex. Yes, I was upset there would be no walk­ing the floor for me because I would be tied to the arrow key dur­ing my pre­sen­ta­tions this week. But, I under­stand bro­ken, messed up, old and needs fix­ing. I have an abun­dance of patience for an inan­i­mate object.

I too have tons of patience for peo­ple who need help and instruc­tion. I can do that and not lose my com­po­sure. But it gets chal­leng­ing when a mega colos­sal com­pany who touts they “care” shows me (and come to find out after a lit­tle Google action a bunch of oth­ers) they don’t.

So, the fact that 6 trans­fers later, 6 times giv­ing my name, ser­vice tag, email address, phone and alter­nate phone num­bers, 6 times hav­ing to re-explain (and in some cases re-explain) a wrong ser­vice con­tract pur­chase and 5.5 hours later –> NO RESOLUTION…

A tweet

It’s called pub­lic humil­i­a­tion, being taken to task, forced account­abil­ity.….. It’s a shame it had to resort to that but I did it because I felt I was at the end of my rope.

It works

What’s miss­ing in the Dell tag cloud from their blog on Cus­tomer Ser­vice & Tech­ni­cal Sup­port is “cus­tomer service”.

What’s miss­ing at Dell is an appro­pri­ate CRM sys­tem or the enabling of tech­ni­cians and/or cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tives to access it.

What’s miss­ing at Dell is train­ing on warm trans­fers — where the employee trans­fers your call and your infor­ma­tion SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO REPEAT IT 6 TIMES…

What’s miss­ing at Dell are pre-employment assess­ments for lis­ten­ing skills and talk­ing over the customer.

What’s miss­ing at Dell is accul­tur­a­tion and train­ing of off shore teams on US cus­tomer expectations.

Per­sonal note to Michael Dell:

Dear Michael, if you would like to talk about fix­ing the type of cus­tomer ser­vice com­plaints that are abun­dantly pop­u­lated all over the Inter­net I would be happy to have that con­ver­sa­tion. You see, the gen­eral con­sen­sus is that you make a great prod­uct — but the lack of cus­tomer ser­vice skills your off shore teams pro­vide is a gap­ing oppor­tu­nity for improve­ment. Let me help you fix that. ~Karla

P.S. My new fam­ily mem­ber is a black cat (haven’t even seen him yet) that was aban­doned & I couldn’t be respon­si­ble for his euthana­sia so instead I gave him a spa overnight at the vet clinic that included vac­ci­na­tions and a lit­tle nip tuck =) Please sup­port ani­mal res­cues so they can afford to offer low cost spay and neuter pro­grams and by all means –> adopt from a shel­ter, do not buy from breed­ers and stores and spay and neuter your lit­tle furry loved ones. We’ll have a pawty when he gets here and I’ll post a pic or 2.