Can This Reputation Be Saved?

Dell 's Customer Service
Death by blogging?

The Short Answer: Not for a very long time.

The trashing of Dell's reputation for customer service may be the first ever reputational death by blogging. But it should set off big time alarm bells for everyone in the business.

Here's the scoop. "Dell Hell" began with one Randy Cassingham on www.thisistrue.com telling his readers about the horrendous service problems he was having with Dell. More customers chimed in, and eventually the mainstream media, in the form of Business Week no less, started paying attention.

Within a couple of weeks, Dell's ranking in the University of Michigan customer service poll dropped precipitously. Simultaneously, blogger Jeff Jarvis at www.buzzmachine.com got on Dell's case because of the runaround the company gave him when he was trying to get his machine fixed. Within weeks, daily visits to Jarvis' blog had risen to 10,000 and the typical response was, "Dude, get an Apple." Customer after customer relayed how they had thought they were buying a trouble free machine, only to find out that if anything went wrong, help was not on the way. Most of the comments spoke of the "good old days" when Dell's service was good. (Read "What is the Dollar Value of Positive or Negative PR About Your Brand?" for an interesting analysis of this situation.)

In response, Dell has admitted that it needed to beef up its customer service staff. (They did not, however, address one of the most frequently voice complaints, which is the language barrier caused by outsourcing customer service to India.)

Can they recover? Not quickly. People remember bad news much longer than good, so it will take a lot more very happy customers to blog many times more often to change the general opinion out there.

Dell should have learned from the Intel crisis a decade ago. The wider the reach of your advertising and marketing, the more vulnerable you are to customer complaints. Intel spent some $500 million getting the Intel Inside message out to the world, only to be surprised when someone found a bug in its chips and the world complained -- loudly. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove wrote a wonderful book, Only the Paranoid Survive, that gives first person insight into that crisis. Michael Dell should read it.

What makes for an interesting comparison is Apple's recent encounter with the blogerati over weaknesses in the nano. When one Apple nano fan complained about scratches on, and ultimate cracking of, the case, Apple's initial response was, "It's the way it is and if you don't like it, buy a carrying case."

So incensed was the customer that he immediately put up an anti-Apple blog and started soliciting complaints from fellow nano users. Within days the complaints had multiplied and escalated to such a level that Apple took notice, and offered refunds. The customer was sufficiently mollified to not only take down his criticisms, but to leave the Web site up to tell readers that he was now a satisfied customer. The lesson: By the time someone gets mad enough to blog about you, it's too late. You need to be listening to your customers all the time. Think about it – Dell and Apple spend hundreds of millions of dollars talking at their customers in ads, on the Web, and in the media. How much do they spend listening?

You know you need to measure your results, but chances are there’s never been enough money in your budget for evaluation. Until now.
KDPaine & Partners’ new Do-It-Yourself Dashboard system combines a Web-based application with professional consulting to enable PR professionals to customize their own PR dashboards. Look here for more information.

1. You’ll learn how to use hard numbers to prove the results of your PR efforts.

2. You’ll learn which are the right vendors for your measurement projects.

3. You’ll learn how to design your program right from the start to be easily measureable.

Click here to
subscribe now!
(It’s 100%
money-back guaranteed!)

51 Durham Point Road, Durham, NH 03824
603-868-1550 fax: 603-868-3346 www.measuresofsuccess.com