Yeah … Dell Support again.

A few days ago I ordered a new laptop … Inspiron 600m. It’s very similar to my current Inspiron 8600, but has a smaller display (I don’t like the wide display on the 8600), and it has wireless a, b, & g.

I placed the order on July 28th … and the order status hasn’t changed since going to “In Production”.

I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t a problem with the order, so I went to the Dell website and navigated to “Chat with order support”.

The order support rep I chatted with had a very very tenuous grasp of english … and didn’t really understand the concept of ‘shipping date’ and ‘delivery date’.

The rep I chatted with told me that the system was going to “SHIP” sometime between August 16th and 18th. The online order status page indicated that the system would ship on the 11th.

We went back and forth a few times … he couldn’t figure out where I was getting a shipping date of the 11th. I couldn’t find a status page that indicated anything other than the 11th.

Turns out, when he was referring to the word “SHIP”, he meant “DELIVERY”.

The system would still SHIP on the 11th … and would probably be delivered sometime between the 16th and 18th.

I sure wish Dell would bring their customer service and support back to the states. Problems like this would probably go away.

Update a litte later:

I found a useful site that provided a better way of getting order status. If you call 1-800-433-9014 and “speak” your order number, you can get a more up-to-date status. In my case, even though the official order status is “In Production”, the phone system indicates that my order is in the “Build” phase.

Oh, did I mention that I hate VRU’s that require that you speak and do not accept input from the telephone keypad?

[tags]Dell, Support[/tags]