I was with one of the acquired companies and have been in the IT services industry my entire career. As soon as we became part of Dell Services, I made it my mission in life to successfully transition to this larger, global company. It was a very exciting time an one that I embraced with enthusiasm. By all performance metrics, I was very successful. I also made more money with Dell than at any other time in my career. Unfortunately, it was a very stressful and dissatisfying experience overall.
What became apparent very quickly is that Dell's approach to services is similar to it's approach to hardware. In hardware sales, once the paperwork is signed and the equipment is delivered, the work is essentially done. In services, once the paperwork is signed, the real work just begins (now it is time to deliver). The need to form 'trusted adviser' relationships with customers and to put the right measures in place to ensure exceptional customer service on a consistent basis is not understood by Dell senior leadership. While Dell appreciates the value of high NPS (customer satisfaction - Net Promoter Survey) scores, the focus is strictly on the scores and not the steps that need to be taken to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction. The primary focus of services is on sale of new business and cost reduction efforts.
Dell literally performs workforce reductions every month. That's right every single month. Worse yet, leadership responsible for affected employees is not involved or even consulted as to who will be let go (this is done exclusively by HR). As you can imagine this often results in very inappropriate decisions that directly impact service levels, customer relationships, and (surviving) employees morale. It is important to point out that leaders often only find out an employee who reports to them is being let go as the same time as the affected employee. Another aspect of the cost-cutting focus is a huge push to send as many jobs overseas as possible, regardless of any diminished quality of service that may result. I've been in this industry for several decades and trust me, many roles can be done anywhere with little disruption to quality of service; however, there are also many that should not be moved offshore. Dell errors on the side of offshoring and the impact is often obvious to its customers.
Finally, Dell seems to think that similar to a hardware assembly line, where an army of individuals will each perform a single task as part of an overall assembly, services functions should also be fragmented to an extreme degree. Unfortunately, the result of having relatively simply functions distributed across so many individuals located in so many geographic areas, is that when any issues occur (which happens frequently in any services business) it is very difficult to find the source of the problem and/or find anyone to be accountable for a resolution. It is very unlikely that any issue will be resolved before it impacts the customer. Issues that might have taken a couple hours or days to resolve in a more traditional organization often take weeks and even months to resolve with Dell's fragmented workforce approach. Try explaining to your customer why your company still hasn't resolved a minor issue after several weeks. The experience left me, and the majority of my peers, feeling helpless on a regular basis.
I could go on and on and provide many specific examples, names, dates, and details, but hopefully you get the point. It is extremely stressful knowing that, regardless of job performance, you or one of your valued team members could be on HR's hit list in next month's workforce reduction. Dealing with the constant service delivery issues and extraordinarily slow resolution to those issues results in chronic frustration and stress, especially for those on the 'front lines', who constantly have to smooth things over with the customer.