When you go out and buy yourself new hardware or software you have the option of purchasing maintenance agreements at the same time. For software this generally provides the ability to constantly upgrade to the latest and greatest product. For hardware this tends to provide onsite support for when things go wrong and an SLA around that support arriving and the hardware being fixed.

I’ve been dealing with hardware and software vendors for years, I thought I’d share a couple of stories the really depict excellent service and the stuff that you never want to deal with as a customer.

The bad

When I started at one of my previous positions I walked into a Dell shop. If you aren’t familiar with that term it means that all hardware purchased was through Dell and that it gave us steeper discounts on the hardware that we would purchase.

I was put in charge of the Windows team pretty early at this company and we started to go through a hardware refresh. I sat down with the team and started asking questions about how things were with Dell. To a person they liked the hardware and what it delivered however they hated the service. There were common problems with SLAs not being met, the wrong replacement parts being delivered and phone support being unable to provide decent assistance.

I brought these issues to the Dell account rep and explained that we were looking at a fairly significant budget spend the next year on hardware (>$1m) and that I needed to see better results from the support team over there if I was going to spend any of that money with them.

Over the next 6 months I thoroughly documented every engagement with their support staff. This support engagements included:

• Server down – customer impact
• Hardware problem, replacement part needed – non-customer impacting
• General troubleshooting assistance required – non-customer impacting

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