Dell – Not Prepared? Amazing!

The past two weeks have been very interesting indeed. Surfing my favorite blogs, I came across rants about Dell ignoring their online support forums because of very vocal criticism of their offline support services. The critics were hard on Dell about the product quality and poor after purchase service when internal components needed replacing. [You can read about it here (Jeff Jarvis) and here .]

The pressure mounts and what did Dell do? They pulled the plug. No fight, no discourse, no plan. What does this tell us?

Simply put, you must be prepared for criticism of your products and services online. If you are not ready, it will appear that the wave is high and you can’t swim through it. If you are ready, you can manage it and not let a mountain build out of a molehill. Dell wasn’t ready for the bloggers who criticized them, despite having great software and moderators who were active every day.

A client of ours, AARP is ready for criticism. They face it every day in various forms. By taking a stance on Social Security or Prescription Drug Benefits, AARP starts the conversations that sometimes build into harsh criticism of AARP, its leaders, positions, etc. But unlike Dell, AARP plans for the criticism and actually manages through it. The idea is that AARP should control where the discussion takes place (meaning their web site) instead of a third party with unknown loyalties, ties, etc. In fact, AARP presented on this very topic in our 2002 Online Executive Roundtable.

This is what totally shocked me about Dell. To not have this type of plan in place, Dell has made two serious mistakes:

1. The conversations about Dell’s quality will now spread and take place on sites and blogs where Dell cannot see the qualitative content and quantitative metrics related to their quality. So they will either guess at how many customers this impacts or will make a bigger mistake and ignore it all.
2. The customer satisfaction ratings for Dell may fall because they are alienating a group of customers who used their interactive service and truly benefited. Dell needed to address these critical customers and then manage the situation. Many customers and prospective customers will not read through the critical posts and then go to the posts that could answer their question. Instead they will read the criticism, see no response and then they will bail out. These same customers who used the self service online forums and notes will now call the 800 number, wait, hopefully understand the person on the line in the call center, and then try and troubleshoot the problem. This will alienate customers and even in the short run increase support costs driving earnings downward. (Because what’s cheaper, self service and customers helping customers or running a call center in India?)

So, the best practice to learn from all of this is to make sure you have the resources and a plan to deal with the inevitable crisis on your site. Don’t do what Dell did. Manage through don’t shut out your other customers.

If you’d like to learn more about online criticism and how to manage it to your advantage or if you’d like to learn more about AARP’s Roundtable Presentation, please contact us.

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