Colour me unimpressed. This is a rant about Dell’s incredibly poorly-functioning webstore (the part that deals with orders that go wrong).

I made a Dell order about a week ago (actually I made two: work is buying me a laptop, but the one I’m talking about now was for a replacement drive for Olga’s laptop and a printer). Apparently they ran out of stock on one of the things I ordered, so I got an email asking what I wanted to do about it: pay the same amount and get something similar-but-different, or cancel my order.

No option to get everything else but the missing component, mind: cancel, or take their choice of substitute. (If they didn’t get a reply within “(x) days”, the order would be cancelled of its own accord.)

First thing I tried to do was go to my order status page and cancel the order immediately. To get to the order status page, you need two pieces of information: order number, and any of about five other options (client number, business name, etc). Because the order hadn’t actually been successfully placed, I didn’t have a client number. I hadn’t filled in a business name. The “email address” option returned me to the same page and stopped showing in the dropdown list. It seemed I was not going to be allowed to cancel my order myself.

The mail asked me to make my preference known by replying to the email, with an X placed in a cell of a table. Apparently this was going to be automatically processed, because they made a point of informing me that any extra message I added would not be seen by anyone.1 Trouble is, I read my mail in a text-only client (it renders html tables nicely, but using ascii symbols). The webmail client for that address couldn’t handle the table, and while the text version looked ok I had serious doubts that their system would be able to do anything sensible with it.2 Still, I sent it off in an oddly unrealistic flash of optimism.

Dell actually sent me a reply. An empty reply, with no text except the email I sent them (quoted).

Today’s mail brought another surprise: a reminder that I ought to sort out the problem with my order, otherwise it would be cancelled within 48 hours. Not “(x)” hours any longer, which is an improvement. On the other hand, the email was in French, which isn’t.

Yes, that’s right: French. The website I visited was Dell Nederland. The order was placed in Dutch, the html-table “Plaats een ‘X’ in het juiste vakje” was in Dutch. The reply was empty, so I don’t know what language that was intended to be in. But the reminder was in French.

So now I’ve given up. I’ve placed a new order. I’m letting the old one expire (and I will be checking my bank account carefully to see that the money –which is currently with a company Dell apparently uses to handle its online transactions– comes back). The whole process has taken nearly a week (assuming nothing goes wrong with this order) and Dell’s automated systems have been fighting me at every turn.

  • The double-security on the “status of order” page meant that I couldn’t get in to see my own order, let alone do anything with it.
  • The options didn’t even include the obvious one. (“Skip the missing component and don’t bill me for it.”)
  • The mail template didn’t get filled in for how long before the order expired. Since I couldn’t get in to look at the status of the order… no idea.
  • Whose ridiculous idea was it to try to parse an html table in an email reply, looking for an X in a table cell?
  • If you’re going to do something so likely to fail, including some text in the failure report seems like the obvious next step.
  • And French?

Notes:

  1. Yes, they saw me coming: I was going to write, “Just send me the rest and bill me for that, you twits.” [↪]
  2. In retrospect, I should have jumped through whatever hoops were needed to get that mail into GMail, which probably could have handled the html table just fine. Sigh. [↪]