C is for Customer

I get mail. Like one from John Montgomery, who says “You missed a letter” when I wrote “A is for Arrogant, B is for Bloggers, D is for Dell.”

Indeed. C is for Customer, a point that people who design and sell hardware and software should remember.

Scoble says:

…tonight I got back and see Ed Bott called me arrogant for suggesting that Dell should have paid attention to blogs.

Robert, if that’s what you had said, I would have given you a shout-out. But you said something very different. Your post was entitled “Dell misses chance to make influential happy.” Not “Dell doesn’t listen to its customers.” Inside, you said, “If you aren’t listening to the new word-of-mouth network you’ll miss opportunities like this to make influentials happy.” (By the way, although I disagree with this one point, the rest of Robert’s response is worth reading, because it shows, clearly, that Microsoft has a pretty damn good understanding of how to listen to its customers. Robert, I hope you make this point in your new book.)

This isn’t about making bloggers happy. A-list, B-list, or Z-list, they represent only one form of feedback. Yes, Dell should be reading blogs. But it should also be reading its own message boards and listening to the people who call in to its help centers. If the company were doing that, it would have known months or years ago that it had serious, systemic issues with customer service and specific problems with the power supplies in the Dell Dimension 4600. This thread on Dell’s message boards started in November 2004 and went up to 32 pages before Dell shut it down. Customer after customer has the identical complaint: Their Dimension 4600 refuses to power up, typically a few days, weeks, or months after the warranty expires. A new power supply would fix the problem – and does, for those who are lucky enough to find this thread – but when they call customer service they’re told they need a new motherboard.

Go ahead, read this message posted just in the past week and tell me why posting it on a blog would have made it more important:

Some free advice for Dell.  Dell, if you are listening, people who take the time to participate in your Community Forum are by definition among the most loyal customers you have.  You are making a terrible economic choice when you alienate us with flat denials rather than acknowledging the problem and giving a credit for the failed units – for example, a credit towards the next purchase of a new Dell system.  The actual cost of such a credit when put in the context of the profit from the sale of a new system is miniscule in comparison to the goodwill you would generate.  The cost of such a credit is considerably less, I’m sure, than the many forms of promotion that you regularly offer.  And if you tied the credit to the purchase of a replacement Dell PSU, I would bet that the cost of the credit would be offset by the profit on the new PSU.  So you would probably have a “no-cost” way of responding to your loyal customers… and I am sure you could do it with appropriate language that would meet your lawyers’ concerns of not admitting any legal responsibility for these units.  In contrast, you are writing back to loyal customers with the wholly insulting statement that “there are no known issues” when it is demonstrably true by reading the posts.  You are missing a very significant and essentially cost-free opportunity to generate enormous goodwill with your loyal customers.  You are in the marketing business and you are failing to recognize a fundamental opportunity for building goodwill rather than destroying it.  And you know well that the type of people who participate in forums such as these are the very same people that are sought out for advice on computers when their less technologically-engaged friends need help in deciding what to buy.  There is a significant ripple effect to alienating these people… who then write posts to the community forum expressing their strong negative feelings for all to see.  Someone is making a very big mistake.

If Dell were listening to people like this, Jeff Jarvis probably wouldn’t have had the experience he did.

Steve Rubel tried to address my concerns in a podcast (where he said he’s going to stop using the term A-lister) and in an update to his original post, in which he says: “In Jeff’s case, however, there’s no doubt he has a bigger megaphone, which ups the need to act with urgency.”

Sorry, Steve, that still completely misses the point. Does Jeff’s beg megaphone make his problem as a customer more serious than that guy who posted on Dell’s forum? No way. As a PR professional, your allegiance is to the Company, not the Customer, and from that point of view, then yes, Dell should take care of this guy with the big megaphone before lots and lots of people hear that he’s telling the truth about their crappy customer service. But it sure would be better if Jeff could have had a great customer service experience to begin with, so he could have used his big megaphone to tell everyone how much he loves his new Dell. But that won’t happen until Dell starts listening and fixing the problem.

Anyway, I think the megaphone is a bad analogy. A better comparison is a fire alarm. Bells have been ringing for a long time now all over Dell, and the company has been sticking its fingers in its ears and ignoring the sound as the fire spreads. When someone with the circulation of a Jeff Jarvis gets hold of the story, it means you’ve got a four-alarm fire. And you can’t put out the fire with PR.

As one of Steve’s commenters correctly noted:

In this one post, you’ve demonstrated a complete ignorance of what is important about blogs. The size of an individual’s megaphone isn’t what is important about blogs or blogging. … The size of the conversation was what made that story, not the size of the megaphone that began it. My observation is that A-listers have a very narrow view and lack of perspective suffering from the same moral blindness that threatens the MSM types that you long to become or formerly were.

Harsh, but true.