Dell, a global player with global service & solutions? Yes & No ...

100 points posted to Service and Support, Simplify IT by xaerts 03/02/07 **PARTIALLY IMPLEMENTED**

I work in a multinational with offices all around the globe. As IT Manager for the Europe region (15 offices) I am a bit dissapointed in the way that Dell cannot organise a better Global program or even a regional program.

And yes I know all about premier pages and we had meetings all over the globe with Dell and Dell International Business Consultants.

For the EMEA region it comes down to this:

Many countries have their own keyboard type and power plug types. Dell can deliver that straight from the factory, great, I love that! That's something you can't accomplish with IBM ThinkPads etc.

Now we order everything through an account manager in the UK who can ship our orders to the local offices all over Europe with the correct keyboard layouts etc. At least we accomplished that! Two years ago that was not even possible. (shipping to Poland is still not possible, but ok, at least the 14 other offices are sorted this way)

The problem is that we cannot have this setup through a corporate premier page, so all orders go by phone/e-mail. We have poor tracking and history reporting because of that.

An even bigger issue is that the UK can only accept orders in GBP and invoice to one address in the UK. And that's the big pain! All invoices go to our office in London who then need to rebill all the other offices throughout Europe and convert it to EUR, SEK, ...

I wish Dell could just get us an Premier Page where all orders are taken and the billing is done though Dell local branches to the office who requested the equipment. That would be a huge cost saver for us (time/resources).

It also is a little silly that for instance Brussels needs a printer toner, we need to go through the UK to order a toner, have it shipped from Ireland to Brussels. All the hassles for just a toner. Calling Dell locally does not help, as we only have a UK Dell account and we are considered to be NO client of Dell for the local offices.

Alternatively working with local Dell reps doesn't work either as we loose our volume discount agreements.

What we like about Dell is mostly the price/quality and the delivery lead times. Support is ok, but also here some improvement/remarks.
In the US it seems like you need to be Dell Certified to place a support call, in EU luckily not (yet).
Please Dell, make a better difference between professional customers and consumers. None of our offices have local IT staff! We have a centralised helpdesk. If a PC dies in Germany and we do the troubleshooting and we say it is a thermal event on the motherboard, it is a thermal event. Then the nightmare begins; the local office (mostly woman) need to call Dell Support in their local country and they start to ask to open up the PC and do this or that.

Our Helpdesk cannot place the call as we are not physically in front of the PC/laptop to do the requested things by Dell Support. Neither do we speak the local language of the Dell Support team in the country where we have an issue.

I would love to have an international number where IT people can contact Dell to report a fault on a machine in ANY location. Dell will need to trust the knowledge of the clients IT team and dispatch a local tech to fix the issue.

Who knows my posting gets on the desk of M. Dell !

Best regards

X.A.
Belgium



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