Internet and marketing everyman Seth Godin makes an interesting point on his blog post Silencing The Bell Doesn’t Put Out The Fire.
Seth’s point is that satisfying vocal complainers doesn’t address underlying problems in the business and cites the Dell Hell saga of Jeff Jarvis as an example of where load complaints were a symptom of a much deeper issue within the business.
For Dell, this had been the choice to focus on the low value, high volume market segments. To compete there it meant cheap components and selling to comparatively uneducated, price sensitive consumers.
Compounding that decision was Dell’s decision to partly address the inevitable cost pressures they had put themselves under by outsourcing their support lines to truly dire, lowest price providers.
As a consequence of abandoning its service culture, Dell rapidly gained a reputation as being unreliable and unhelpful. One only has to look at the Dell Hell comments on Jeff’s original posts to see how damaged Dell’s name was.
I encountered Dell’s shocking support during that period first hand in PC Rescue, one customer asked me to troubleshoot her Dell PDA after their support line had reduced her to tears.
Very quickly I discovered why, the installation software supplied by Dell didn’t work properly – testing was obviously another victim of budget cuts – and the tech support people were working with an early version.
We managed to fix the problem without the “help” of Dell’s helpdesk and the client swore never again to buy Dell. She’s now a happy Apple customer who is a happy to pay a slightly higher sticker price for a better product and service.
The real concern was that during this period Dell’s management were oblivious to the problems they were suffering in the marketplace, they were meeting their KPIs and appeared to be growing sales while the business itself was about to go over a cliff.
Dell’s management could have recognised this had they chosen to, the company had plenty of market intelligence, customers surveys and their support logs to tell them they had a problem. It wasn’t in their interests to do so.
Today every business has those tools to monitor what customers are saying about them. Google Alerts, Facebook and – if you’re in hospitality – Tripadvisor, Yelp or Eatability.
With social media it’s easy for the bad message to get out; it’s also easy for management or owners to watch out for problems.
Dell only survived the Dell Hell experience because they were big and well capitalised, no smaller business could have survived similar damage done to their reputation.
Smaller businesses don’t have the luxury of ignoring their customers until the screams become too loud.
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