Not only do Dell have a terrible web site but it seems they’re also in the running for the worst customer service that I’ve seen for some time.

When I ordered my new computer on Tuesday there were four special offers listed for the model I bought. They were double the amount of memory you paid for, a free printer, buy now pay next year and (most importantly) free delivery. I was interested in the memory, the printer and the free delivery charge.

Once I had gone through the configuration process and chosen all the options I wanted I was ready to check out. At that point I was surprised to see that a delivery charge had been added to the invoice. I realise that I should have cancelled the order or got on the phone to them or something like that, but it was late, I was tired, and I’d wasted enough time on the purchase already so I just went ahead and placed the order.

Immediately, I started to regret doing that, so I decided to complain to them and see if I could get the delivery charge back. After a couple of false starts with contact forms that didn’t work I found a way to email customer support and explained what had happened. I suggested that either the offer didn’t exist (and therefore their web site had incorrect information) or that their ordering process had some kind of bug in it.

The next day I got an email telling me that my order didn’t include the free delivery offer.

See, this seems to be becoming a common tactic with customer support. On the first response, just tell the customer something that he already knows in the hope he’ll just go away and stop bothering you. I knew that my order didn’t include free delivery, but I wanted to know why it didn’t include free delivery when the web site clearly says that it should include free delivery.

Oh, actually there was a bit of extra information in their email. It told me that the reason my order didn’t include the offer was because the offer “had expired before or was introduced after you placed your order”. Which was nonsense as the order was placed on August 2nd and the web site said that the offer finished on the 3rd.

So I wrote another email. Explaining in what I thought was an almost painful level of detail what the problem was. I pointed out that the offer was listed on the web site as I placed the order and that I the invoice gave no indication as to why the offer hadn’t been applied to my order. I got an email back pretty quickly saying that my case had been passed on to the “concerned department” who would “have your query looked into and resolved effectively”.

And just now I got a phone call. From someone who told me that the special offer had not been applied to my order, but was unable to explain why. I explained again, everything that I had said in the email and she reacted as this was all new information to her. She even asked my if I had a copy of the web page with the offer on it – which, of course, I don’t.

So anyway, she’s gone off again and has promised to ge back to me with more information as soon as possible. I’m starting to suspect that they’ll just deny the offer ever existed.

But if I don’t get this £57 back then I’ll never buy from Dell again.