Dell - Going Backwards?

I have, for years, been a happy customer at Dell.com. My wife has a Dell laptop I helped her to customise for her personal needs, I helped my daughter customise a powerful desktop to meet her needs as an illustrator, I have a now aging Inspiron 1525 which I am seriously thinking of upgrading, so my first port of call was the Dell website.

I was horrified, you are no longer able to customise laptops to your budget and needs and meet that happy medium of getting the best within your budget. Dell have fallen into the corporate trap! By this I mean I went onto their chat with an advisor, and was given what I can only conclude was the company line, helpful and polite but useless.

I then got a phone call from Dell, again a nice person with an Indian accent. Now I am far from racist, but I instantly thought of The Big Bang Theory where poor Raj, who tries his hardest and is nice a person as possible, makes so many mistakes because of the nuances native English speakers understand.

Again I appeared to be fed the company line. We have listened to our customers and we have speeded up our delivery time by ready made laptops. Not what I want I said politely, I want to be able to choose options, such as CPU, colour, storage, ram etc. We have lots of options was the reply, yes but I want to choose options for myself I said, well to cut a long story down, I ended up thanking the nice person on the phone and stated I would look elsewhere, as he had stated that everyone now does this.

Within 5 minutes of searching I found that Sony allow customisable laptops, Novatech in the UK also have a good reputation and will help you, and System 76 have some stunning laptops each one customisable as Dell used to be.

Dell have made a mistake only a novice marketing manager could make and will loose a small group of customers because of this. I do say small as geeky people like me are in the minority of wanting to customise their laptops, but any loss of custom should be avoided at all cost.

If Dell had kept a small section of the site for people like me (remember I am a returning customer) so I can play with various configurations to get the compromise to suit my budget. Another thing I noticed was that there is no complaint tab either at the top or the bottom of the screen, are they that good?

Did them no good though as Twitter and a quick search got me the email and Twitter address of Michael Bell (CEO and founder) so I hope he reads this blog. I am a manager, if I was to loose even one customer, I quite rightly get the third degree from my employer, why? How can this be avoided? What did I personally do to try and not loose this customer? As many who read my blogs (really not that many!) you know that I work in the service industry as a care home manager where income is extremely important, so is matching the care to each individual.

Mr Dell should seriously look at what has gone wrong and why customers like myself will now be looking elsewhere. My preference is System 76 as the way that you can make your laptop your own is very similar to the way Dell once were.