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How Dell treats a million $ customer

July 1st, 2008

Here at AppNexus we obviously spend a significant chunk of money on servers & hardware to build out our computing cloud. Over the past year we’ve primarily dealt with Dell as they came in great on price and worked their asses off to get our data centers up and running quickly and efficiently. We were assigned a “new account team” that really went the extra-mile to get things done for us.

Three months ago, when we passed the 6-month mark Dell kindly transitioned us over to a new “maintenance team”. Quite to our surprise this team has been nothing but trouble — less touch, less care and, at times, just straight-up sloppy service. Two weeks ago we kicked-off the process for a new $1 million hardware purchase — hot off the back of two smaller $100k purchases (eg, we are a hot & active customer). Because Dell had historically quite good to us on larger orders we gave them “first dibs” — if they could turn around a quote in 48-hours we wouldn’t shop the deal across other vendors.

Well, instead of taking us up on the offer our account team sat on their hands for 48 hours and then both our server rep & primary contact went on vacation for a week with no backup or notice! It’s not been a full two weeks and — no quote from Dell, no visit to our office to discuss specs & requirements, severely delayed sloppy and incorrect quotes — really — no love. Maybe I’m wrong, but in my experience when a customer calls and says they’re ready to buy — you do whatever you can to satisfy their needs. The worst part is –this order is only the first of many planned over the coming quarters — they’re about to lose a multi-million $ account.

Thankfully we’ve built our cloud to be vendor independent and kept an open line to HP & Sun — both of which have been very proactive in the past week to address our needs. Let’s hope they don’t transition us to a “maintenance account” six months from now though!

Ok — that’s enough cloud talk for now — back to advertising!

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Posted by Mike Filed in Uncategorized
4 Comments »

  • http://direct2dell.com/cloudcomputing/ BruceericatDell

    Mike: I’ve read your post and want you to know Dell is listening — we hear you and apologize that you’ve had a bad experience with your sales team.

    I’ve escalated this to our management team and they will be in touch to see how we can rectify the situation. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

    twitter: Bruceericatdell

  • http://www.gratisinternet.com/careers/ PWills

    Mike: Similar story here. When we were with the “small business” team (called “Gold”), all was great. Quick responses, low prices, friendly reps.

    Then one day we ordered too much… Bam! Our account was transitioned to an “enterprise” rep, based overseas, who was never around. We literally were not able to order equipment for 3 weeks.

    Finally after much begging and whining, we were allowed to “downgrade” to our small business team.

    It seems like someone at Dell is actively trying to eff it up and hand their market share to HP. Might even be a corporate saboteur.

  • http://direct2dell.com/cloudcomputing/ BruceericatDell

    Mike: you’re drawing in some other detractors. @Pwills — I can tell you that our small business team has seen your comment as well and is looking into it. We certainly aren’t trying to give market share to anyone but we do have our own fair share of issues as a company and it’s a shame that anyone would have to ‘beg’ for good service. Not acceptable. We’re trying to correct those issues. Shoot me a note directly at bruce_eric_anderson@dell.com if you have something specific that needs handling.

    Bruceericatdell – twitter

  • http://dbjohnsonphoto.wordpress.com/ dbjohnson

    I’ve only dealt with Dell from a personal point of view…and can attest that the experience (from their losing my computer sent in for service to only getting service reps with Indian accents so thick they could not be understood) has assured that the likelihood of a new Dell passing my threshold is EXTREMELY unlikely.