A Happy Dell Service Report

Just to provide a modicum of balance to the negative reports about Dell service, here's what just happened to me. I recently bought a Photo 964 printer and set it up as per instructions. Photos were coming out horribly streaked and missing some colors altogether. I ran the photo and color cartridges through quite a few cleaning cycles and that helped some but the cleaning sheet showed light cyan and light magenta to still be streaking and almost non-existent. I called Dell and got a guy from India online. "Oh boy," I thought. "Here we go!". I'm happy to say I was wrong. After walking me through many diagnostic steps (some of which I had already done) he concluded that the photo cartridge was bad. I don't blame him for having to follow a script and go through each step methodically. With such a wide range of customers, that technique is the most reliable. You can't always rely on the customer's self buttessment of his-her skills. In any case, once the determination of the bad cartridge was made, the rep said he would have a new one sent right out. Two days later it arrived as promised and the new one works perfectly, just as it should. I know horror stories are more exciting, but I just thought I'd let people know that Dell CAN do things right once in a while! Any vendor can send out bad hardware. That's a fact of life. It's the way a company handles the problem that really distinguishes the company in my eyes.

Tom Lake