Last week, I wrote a post about the poor customer service I had experienced as part of my recent Dell server purchase but the very next morning things started to improve.

Firstly, my server turned up a week early.  That’s good – exceeding customer expectations gets a big tick from me.  Ordered at 2pm on Friday, order accepted (i.e. payment cleared) on Sunday, server built to order, shipped from Ireland and delivered in England at 9.15am on Wednesday.  One happy punter.

Then I got an e-mail and a phone call from one of Dell’s Technical Account Managers, who’d seen my blog post and wanted to talk to me about my experience.  I was only to happy to give him feedback on where it all went wrong for me, and in return he promised to look into it and get a server specialist to call me right away.  Sure enough, a few minutes later the phone rang and it was a really helpful representative from the UK and Ireland SME Silver Support Team, who took me through the configuration options on my server that had confused me so much (I’ve added a comment to my original post with the details).

As a gesture of goodwill (and I think it’s only fair to disclose this as I’m now writing so positively about Dell!), they also waived the shipping charge on the extra memory I was about to purchase and shipped some additional SATA cables to allow me to connect a third and fourth drive to my motherboard.

All of that is good news for me but what about those who can’t publicly throw their toys out of the cot (i.e. write a stroppy post on their blog) and who need technical pre-sales support?  Dell’s advice is to either:

• Click on the Request a Call link on the Server page before starting the system build;

or:

• Click on the Purchase Help tab to view contact details for Sales Support.

(As this second option leads to the same page I used before ending up in Dell phone system hell I’d suggest the request a call option.)