Dell to axe 1,000-plus call-centre bods, enterprise staff in prep to go private Dell is laying off staff in its enterprise division, The Register understands, as company honcho Michael Dell prepares to take his firm private. El Reg has heard that Dell is steadily ridding itself of enterprise workers, including senior technologists, strategists, developers, and sales employees, as well as a vice-president …
"If they are going to cut people they should do it in one go, then let the survivors get back to work."
What and miss out on the repeat delights of "Layoff Wednesday"? Think of it as a sort of weekly prize draw, but in reverse.
Unbelievable that any company could have management this callous and incompetent. What makes Dell think that they'll be better at cloud and enterprise offerings than they were at making and flogging PCs?
Are the right people being left go? No problem with some like basic support, but leaving a while enterprise team including engineers and developers smacks of something Mark Hurd (of HP cutting fame) would encourage. Remember strip away the wrong people, engineers in R&D and all you are left with is a hollow brand.
Good for shareholders however long term its a cancer within the company. Dangerous times for Dell.
Restructure properly? Good for shareholders and margins?
Dell went from the number one PC maker 5 years ago to number 3.
Why?
Crappy customer support.
(my other post here was wrong on the number of years. my bad. from 2007 to 2009 they steadily lost market share, falling to 3rd in 2009)
As someone that had work at dell for many years I was quite surprised to have been laid off. The odd thing is that they are laying off people that are crucial to the organization, not just dead weight. Its like the lotto system from hunger games. No rhyme or reason. Some folks got a severance and some did not.
Well Goodness Gracious Me, seems like another company has realized that having a call center staffed by people who most of their customers find unintelligable and who stopped buying the products because of the terrible service from call center staff in these overseas call centers have finally realized the first step to improving customer service is to close down their customer service call centers.
Having had to call Dell Customer service because part of the order had vanished and going round in circles with the Indian staff who could not understand that sending a Screen, keyboard and mouse and losing the tower does not make a complete purchase.
Then of course to have to fight with them and spend several hours telling them that they never sent out the system unit and that we would carry out a charge back. It finally took a threat of attorney's and several weeks before they finally admitted that they hadn't even packaged the system unit for shipping and it had been sitting waiting to be boxed for shipping the whole time.
The final straw was when we purchased a second PC and the hard drive failed. The replacement failed, then the replacement failed and another replacement failed. They kept telling us that it was our fault in their wonderfully broken english.
So when we replaced that PC after the latest drive failure, now that it was out of extended warranty, we just went to Apple. At least you can take it into an Apple store and they will look at it there and then. None of this dealing with people that cannot, dare not, deviate from a script and cannot think beyond that script.
Actually, I have to say thanks to the dell sales team and then support.
After such crap service I thought sod it and went to the church of jobs. Paid less than a grand and had an amazing MBP.
If it was not for such a bad service from dell, apple would not have gained a new customer.
In the last three years I now own and use
MacBook Air (new to the family and replacing a MBP)
Mac mini
Time capsule
iPhone
iPad
Apple TV
Of which I use all of the for different things and had no problems. Even have my old pro to my dad who loves it.
Thanks dell. You showed me the way!
Dell bought a lot of companies and once you integrate them into a huge company like Dell you find you don't need all the staff from the company you bought. It is inevitable that some people would be let go.
I used to work in Dell's Enterprise Support and the horror stories you all are talking about only apply to people who paid for the cheapest warranty you could get. Business customers had Pro Support warranties and these were never supported in India. Basic warranties were so cheap that you call Dell once any profit that was made on the system was gone because they pushed the prices down so low. So of course the only place on the planet with cheap technicians was India. They just didn't have the skill set of those who supported the majority of Dells customers who provide an excellent service.
There isn't any money to be made in desktops and laptops and the only reason I can see that Dell keeps them around is to lock out competitors by making sure there is no reason to go elsewhere for any IT equipment. HP was ready to dump them a couple of years ago and backtracked at the last second.
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