Many here are familiar with the official Dell support forums which has been part of their official community for some time now:
http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums
Well, no longer do they host the support forums part of it. Dell's official word on it is they did it to protect their customer's private information and details that were being posted. They haven't given up support at all, they instead want to focus more on direct chat support and support by phone instead of the open forums.
Some are saying it's being done to hide complaints and people flaming the site and that this will only cause the members to make their complaints in the remailing community sections such as the pre-sales section.
Everyone in the industry knows it's impossible to make everyone perfectly happy unless you want to play the bribe game like some smaller companies do to look good on review sites. With Dell's volume of sales there's going to be some that have problems and voice their opinion. It's important to look at the whole picture when looking at a company rather than only looking at the complaints customers with problems have. Is Dell doing a good job with customer satisfaction or not? Well, that's up to the individual to decide and I'm sure it depends who you ask. The most accurate review website I know of Bizrate can give you an over all idea considering they have nearly 1 million reviews:
Bizrate for Dell
Here's some more to compare them to:
Toshiba
Gateway
Apple
Fujitsu
Sony
All the above stores are customer certified which means they have the review system built into their site providing every customer the opportunity to review them whether it's good or bad. Dell actually seems to compare very well over all. Keep in mind if someone has a 90% positive and 10% negative it doesn't mean 10% of the people were unhappy, it means more along the lines of a 9 out of 10. Shipping delays, pricing, and different things cause most people to give a less than perfect score though all of the above companies you will find your occasional very dissatisfied customer reviewing them. Customers with a negative experience have shown to be MUCH more likely to take their time and review a purchase or company.
And now it is gone. I suppose it was useless anyway, because all remotely useful info came from other users, not the Dell support stuff.
