I never thought I'd be writing this, but Dell (yes, Dell), is charging customers a monthly fee to have access to its United States-based customer service representatives.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the PC maker is charging customers with a Dell account $12.95 per month to have access to an American agent or $99 per year for customers who buy a new PC from the company.
Those who don't pay the sum will be contacting center agents in India or the Philippines. But before you start your bellyaching, Dell is sweetening the pot: wait times are guaranteed to be 2 or fewer minutes!
Great. Thanks, Dell.
A Dell representative told the Post that the company has "heard from customers that it's hard to understand a particular accent and that they couldn't understand the instructions they were getting." Because of that, the company has instituted the policy to "illustrate Dell's commitment to customer choice."
This mouthpiece (and Dell, for that matter) is kidding, right? The company is charging us for access to American customer support agents on products we purchased from it that went wrong? What a joke.
... Read moreDon Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Computer maker Dell is now facing a class action lawsuit that alleges the company underpaid 5,000 call center employees.
A federal judge in the Oregon-filed case gave the lawsuit class-action status last week, according to an article in the Austin American Statesman. Any of the U.S. Dell call center employees who worked from February 8, 2004 to the present can now join the lawsuit to sue Dell as a group, according to the story.
The lawsuit was filed in February 2007 by two employees claiming they were not properly paid for overtime, training, or work preparation time, the story said. The employees are asking the company to pay back their missing wages, including interest, and to fund their attorneys fees. Spherion Corp., a staffing agency that works closely with Dell, is also named as a defendant, according to The Statesman.
Since the case was granted class-action status, 80 more employees have signed on as plaintiffs. A lawyer for the employees said the suit applies to as many as 5,000 former and current call center workers from offices in Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Oregon.
The Statesman also said a similar suit has been filed in Austin by customer service representatives who deal with Dell's corporate customers.
A Dell representative declined to comment to CNET News on the specifics of the pending litigation, but confirmed that the company disputes claims in the case filings.
In May, Dell lost a lawsuit brought by the New York attorney general that claimed the company had been engaging in fraud and deceptive business practices.
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