The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Picking on Dell, Again
Tuesday - January 03, 2006 10:00 AM in
It seems like we've been picking on Dell's customer service a lot lately (for example, this article, or this article, or this article). And like an addict going back for a fix, here I go again....
Another prominent blogger, Jeremy Zawodny, had another customer service horror story posted on his blog recently. He had bought a new LCD monitor from Dell which turned out to be defective. It took him hours of time on the phone (including a stretch of over an hour on hold), several call-backs, and one of the managers actually hung up on him.
I could go into my usual rant at this point about how bad this is, how it's costing Dell money (both directly, through increased support costs, and indirectly, in lost reputation and goodwill), and how they need to shape up. But I've already done that, and I don't want to repeat myself.
But there was one comment which really caught my attention: "....at my first job in Silicon Valley, I knew a guy whose Inspiron died. He called up their tech support for help, and was waiting on an answer, when Michael Dell called him, to make sure that everything was all right with the support he was getting. Evidently, at one point Dell would just call up people at random and see how they were doing."
Obviously Michael Dell is a very busy man, and probably much busier than he was ten or fifteen years ago. So calling random customers to find out how they're doing is probably a luxury he can no longer take the time for.
But Dell used to have a reputation for stellar customer service. Nothing, nothing, gets results better than showing that the boss cares about something. When Michael Dell would pick up the phone and ask a random customer how things went, he was not only sending a message to Dell's customers. He was also sending a message to every Dell employee that they'd better get the customer service right, because the boss was watching and cared enough to take time out of his day to check up on how things were going.
Posted by Peter Leppik
I could go into my usual rant at this point about how bad this is, how it's costing Dell money (both directly, through increased support costs, and indirectly, in lost reputation and goodwill), and how they need to shape up. But I've already done that, and I don't want to repeat myself.
But there was one comment which really caught my attention: "....at my first job in Silicon Valley, I knew a guy whose Inspiron died. He called up their tech support for help, and was waiting on an answer, when Michael Dell called him, to make sure that everything was all right with the support he was getting. Evidently, at one point Dell would just call up people at random and see how they were doing."
Obviously Michael Dell is a very busy man, and probably much busier than he was ten or fifteen years ago. So calling random customers to find out how they're doing is probably a luxury he can no longer take the time for.
But Dell used to have a reputation for stellar customer service. Nothing, nothing, gets results better than showing that the boss cares about something. When Michael Dell would pick up the phone and ask a random customer how things went, he was not only sending a message to Dell's customers. He was also sending a message to every Dell employee that they'd better get the customer service right, because the boss was watching and cared enough to take time out of his day to check up on how things were going.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 10:00 AM by | | | |