For an Optiplex, Inspiron or a Latitude, no. You'll get a Banctec guy. For Poweredge, SANs and such, you get a Dell badged dude, based on your contract.
correct me if i'm wrong, but I thought "the Dell Guy" that comes is a 3rd party company? They'll come to your office and fix your machine, but I'm not sure that guy is a Dell employee...
No idea honestly. Our company has that "gold support" thing, so when something breaks, Dell dispatches a guy within a few hours. We deal only with Dell, not sure what is their employment/subcontracting structure is. I'm in Norway so it might be different anyway.
The guy who came to fix my current laptop was a contractor. Also very concerned about my giving a nice service rating. (Which I did, because he was good.)
They are and the system demonstrates how badly it works compared to Apple.
I had a Dell with a faulty touchpad - it took 12 TWELVE onsite visits to fix it. That included 2 visits where the tech had been given the wrong part and 2 to replace parts that had been broken by the previous tech.
Every visit was a new person, none of them knew that the part they were swapping had already been swapped 6times before - until finally they stopped swapping the touchpad and replaced the motherboard.
But the info that this release MB was faulty was all over the net - it was only Dell that was unaware of it.
Every time a skilled technician (InfoCare business support in Norway) would arrive within the time frame specified in the support contract, change the motherboard and make sure everything worked smoothly.
Well here a lot of my friends had problems with Powerbooks and simply abysmal service from Apple, while Dell Norway for us was impeccable on several occasions. Can be just a regional thing.
When you have high-quality documentation available to the public, you don't need specially trained engineers. Apple's secrecy creates an artificial scarcity which they can capitalize on.
