I bought a computer online from Dell nearly seven years ago, and the process turned into a nightmare.
They sent the wrong monitor, which was the size of a baby elephant, and when I pointed their mistake out to a lady at their Indian call centre, she informed me that Dell didn’t make mistakes.
As I was setting up a business and couldn’t afford a hold-up, I visited PC World and bought one. Then I set about trying to get Dell to retrieve the baby elephant in the corner of my office (well, I say corner, but it practically filled the room), and to refund me the cost of the flat-screen monitor I had never received.
After several weeks of increasingly fraught phone conversations - I was beginning to suspect I would eventually have spoken to every single Indian citizen who could (a) read English from a script, and (b) had access to a telephone – I decided to cut my losses, and fired off an email to a bunch of Dell addresses telling them (in surprisingly reasonable tones, given my frustration) that they were doing a rotten job, that I would never again have any dealings with them, and that I would take every opportunity which presented itself to besmirch their reputation.
Astonishingly, a lady with an Irish accent phoned me a few hours after I’d pressed the “Send” button, apologized profusely, arranged a time for Nellie the Monitor to be picked up (I recommended she send a team of Olympic-level weight-lifters) and said she would arrange for the cost of the monitor to be refunded immediately.
About an hour later, I got a call from Dell’s Indian call centre (I can’t remember what had provoked it) to repeat that everything was my fault, that they wouldn’t pick up the monitor, and that there was no question of my money being refunded. I told them it had all been settled with Dell here in the UK. The Indian caller told me that this was impossible, and then querulously demanded I give him the name and number of the Irish-accented lady I had spoken to.
I hung up.
That experience led me to develop my theory of corporate autism – once they reach a certain size, all institutions lose sight of their primary purpose and become locked in their own self-regarding, solipsistic reality: they become “mindblind”, unable to understand what’s going on inside the heads of their clients or customers. The various parts of the brains of those suffering from ASD – Autistic Spectrum Disorder – don’t communicate properly with each other: It struck me that Dell, formerly a blindingly successful business, had reached that stage.
The good news is that Dell seems to have fully recovered (which unfortunately doesn’t happen to autistic people). I bought a new Dell system recently. The salesman I dealt with on the phone was charming and helpful. The system arrived in half the time they’d warned me it might take. It was what I had ordered. It worked straight out of the box. After five days, it stopped working. Psyching myself up to rip someone a new sphincter, I called them. The lady I spoke to whisked me straight through to a technician, who made us try various things to get the machine to work. When they all failed, his supervisor came on, apologized profusely, and asked if it would be all right to send a real, live, actual technician round the next day to fix it.
I was astonished.
The IT chappie turned up just after lunch (we’d had a call first thing to give us an approximate ETA, and the man himself called when he was ten minutes away). He arrived bearing potential replacement parts, identified the problem, and replaced the motherboard. He was charming throughout, evidently realizing that we might be anxious or angry – or both (or maybe he was just naturally charming).
Everything’s working fine again.
Obviously, it would have been even better if the PC hadn’t developed a major fault in the first place. But given that the company which managed to reduce me to a state of absolute rage a few years back by its unhelpfulness and intransigence has just fixed a major problem with the product it sold me within 24 hours of that problem arising – and without my having to raise my voice once – proves to my satisfaction that corporate autism can be cured.
If only we could the same for the far more devastating human variety of this awful condition.
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