Posted by Ben Worthen
Would you pay extra to have an American answer your customer-service call? Dell is hoping you will.
The computer maker recently put out a press release announcing “new premium support service.” The plan: For a fee, people get the right to talk to “the same dedicated team each time they have an issue” with a Dell product. The kicker: The service will be provided by “an advanced support team in North America.”
The press release has our cynical senses tingling. Is this an admission that Dell’s regular customer service isn’t very good? Wouldn’t someone who anticipates making repeated calls to a customer-service agent instead buy a different product? And is the promise that the reps will be in North America a thinly-veiled attempt to play into jingoistic sentiments? (Some of the comments this blog has received in response to posts about offshore call centers are blatantly racist.)
A Dell spokesman skillfully danced around all of these questions. “We try to do the best we can for all of our customers all the time,” he told us. “That said, we want to be able to provide options for customers.” Asked about the North American bit specifically, he said that Dell has customer-service agents all over the globe, adding that people who don’t pay for the extra service won’t necessarily have a call answered by someone overseas. That a good thing: Many of the Dell customer-service complaints on consumeraffairs.com specifically mention customer-service reps who can’t speak English.
We asked Bern Elliot, a customer-service analyst at Gartner about Dell’s plan. He said it fits his vision of the customer organization of the future, where businesses give customers more control over the service they get. Rather than treating all calls the same, companies can let customers qualify for preferential treatment or special relationships. “First time I’ve heard of a company doing it,” Elliot tells us.
Elliot also has a more likely explanation: Businesses that open call centers overseas but still want to have customer-service reps in the U.S. need to justify the higher salaries they command somehow. This could be a way to do that.
