I bought a new laptop and it arrived last Wednesday. I got it from Dell. It arrived in a week, and it looked and seemed to be “the business”. It isn’t the fastest machine by a long way, but it suits my needs, and it is far better than the seven year old model it was replacing.
When you buy something new you expect it to work perfectly on arrival. My laptop didn’t. It wouldn’t play music CDs and the buttons on the multimedia panel (play, pause, stop, fast forward etc.) didn’t work. I wasn’t overly upset by this as I know my way around PCs and I thought I could fix it – probably just a driver issue. It wasn’t!
At about 19:50 I decided to call Dell. I got through, and successfully transferred to Tech Support queue within 5 minutes. I was on hold for approximately 10 minutes before I got talking to a Tech Support Representative – not bad.
I wish I remembered the rep’s name as he was fantastic. Despite the fact that Dell has me recorded a business customer and as such my daily phone support ends at 18:00 (2 hours earlier), despite the fact that it was now 20:10 and Dell’s home support ends at 20:00, this Tech Support Representative talked me though fixing the problem over the next half-hour. Not only did he resolve the problem, but he did so in a most professional manner, clarifying instructions as necessary and staying on the line to run diagnostics to ensure the problem was well and truly resolved.
For any techie readers out there, the solution was to roll-back my laptop’s Bios version to a previous release. Not your typical solution, but it worked.
Now I know that the laptop should have arrived fully functioning, and it didn’t. Not the best of starts by Dell. However, I still consider the whole experience to be a positive one. The actions of this Dell representative will mean that I’ll recommend buying Dell to anyone who asks. Yes, this is just my experience, and maybe I was lucky, but it is my very positive experience and that counts more to me than any negative reviews I might read.
The experience reminded me that going the extra mile to assist people can make the difference between them wanting to work with you again, and them choosing another. This idea isn’t new at all. There is a school of thought that if you resolve problems for people in business, then they are more likely to work with you in the future than if everything went perfectly. But I think the approach can be applied outside of business. It makes a good philosophy in personal relationships also.
This story isn’t about anything earth-shattering, but I’m hoping writing about it in this post will help me remember it in my day-to-day dealings with people.
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