Dell’s abhorrent performance in our 2012 Tech Support Showdown earned it the dubious distinction of receiving the lowest overall score of any company in three years. The company’s failure was a result of deceitful practices employed by phone support representatives claiming we won a so-called contest that allowed us to pay less for a three-year extended warranty. Fortunately, Dell has seemed to clean up its act.
For 2013, Dell re-evaluated its warranty offerings. The company now provides three warranties: a basic hardware warranty, premium phone support for hardware and software questions, and Dell Tech Concierge support. All Dell Inspiron systems get 90 days of premium phone support, while XPS customers get a full year. If you want to use premium phone support outside of your laptop’s warranty, it will cost $224 for one year. The tech concierge service costs an additional $239 for a one-year subscription.
Tech Concierge installs software on your laptop that collects real-time performance data. Despite how much the service sounds like a “Big Brother” watching over your machine, Dell promises that the service doesn’t interact with your personal information.
To test Dell’s tech support, we sought answers for how to create a new user account in Windows 8, how to connect a Bluetooth speaker and how to create a boot drive on an external hard drive using our Dell Latitude 7000 notebook.Dell told us last year that the majority of its technical support questions can be answered via its tech support website. To access Dell’s phone and chat support, your laptop has to be within its warranty period, and you need to have your express service tag on hand. Without an active warranty, you can still find answers to questions on Dell’s site. Unfortunately, the site is a tangled mess of links that had us spinning in circles looking for answers. We searched for about 15 minutes for an explainer for connecting Bluetooth speakers to our laptop, but didn’t find anything useful. Other questions, such as how to create a system backup, were easier to locate.Like most companies, Dell offers a live Web chat service, which was quick and easy to use. It took 10 minutes for customer service technician Vishal to explain how to connect our Bluetooth speakers to our laptop. Unfortunately, Dell has done away with its email support.Dell’s social media team performed well when we asked it questions via Twitter and Facebook. We asked @DellCares how to connect a pair of Bluetooth speakers to our laptop and were sent a direct message with a link to an article on Dell’s site explaining how to do so. Surprisingly, Dell doesn’t allow you to post questions on its Facebook page, instead requiring that you post them to the Dell Community Forums.
