Dell claims its customer support has improved by 90% – do you agree?

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

Customer support is about as sexy as cauliflower cheese, but anyone who’s suffered a bad experience will know just how infuriating it can be. What’s even worse is when it appears that companies just don’t care, which is why my hellishly early interview with Tim Griffin this morning – who has overall responsibility for Dell’s global customer support – was so welcome.

For a start, it’s refreshing that Dell is so open to the fact that its support hasn’t always been great. “We’ve obviously not fared too well in your own surveys over the past couple of years,” Griffin said, referring to PC Pro’s annual reliability and service survey, “and it’s something we’re very cognisant of.”

(I’ll interrupt myself here to say that if you haven’t already taken part – and we do rely on a huge number of responses to make our results significant – then you have just over a week to do so. And you’ll be in with a chance of winning one of our £4,500-worth of prizes too.) (more…)

How to fix online surveys

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

Now it’s true that you can subtly influence the results of surveys by the questions you ask, but Virgin Media appears to have taken a different and more ingenious approach here…

If it’s taken you a little time to spot the “error”, as it did me, take a look at the options to the right. Thanks to Stuart Downs for sending that in!

Technological progress: lost on the masses

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

I loaded up Steam for the first time in a while last night and was promptly asked to participate in Valve’s ongoing hardware survey. I’ve done this before, and the results are always fascinating, so I jumped right in. A few clicks later, and a quick scan of my cobbled-together PC, and I got to see the breakdown of nearly 1.8million gamers’ systems – with some surprises.

Just 41% of polled users have made the much-needed step to a dual or quad-core processor – the norm in pretty much all new PC systems sold today – and 38% have shelled out on 2GB or more of RAM. Assuming a correllation between the two, that leaves a huge proportion of PC players who are still trundling along on 1GB of RAM or less and a single-core CPU.

(more…)