ON A DELL THAT LISTENS

THEY'RE BACK...

Regular readers may recall a post I'd written less than a week ago about my disappointment with a Dell Order I'd placed.  The piece was less about the specific delay on my order, but rather an:

"...anecdote in the context of Dell's recently launched overhaul of it's customer service capabilities on the consumer side of it's franchise.  That was partly in reaction to the Jeff Jarvis lead "Dell Hell" dust-up a couple of years ago."

...I found Dell's customer service people to be easily accessible, responsive and eager to help, the systems and procedures supporting their reps seem to be still letting them down."

Since the post, I heard from some senior folks at Dell wanting to understand the cause of the snafu that affected the order.  This morning I received an email from a senior executive explaining that:

"the issue that impacted you has been root caused and corrective action is being taken to the software system that messed up the ship-date/lead time quote."

From my perspective, this anecdote illustrates that Dell as a company is paying far greater attention to LISTENING to customer service issues on the Consumer side of it's business and then trying to fix them. 

They're trying to keep abreast on what's being said about Dell on the internet, and be responsive.

And that is a discernible change from the Dell of a couple of years ago. 

Also, the company is again innovating on the product side as well. 

The Dell XPS M1730 I'd ordered is one of the first laptops with a dual SSD (solid state drive) and mechanical hard drive, and the latest graphics card and a physics Accelerator card. 

Admittedly these are features are important to early adopter geeks, but this is a mainstream computer company rolling them out ahead of many boutique PC makers.  The model won PC Magazine's Editor's Choice award recently.

Better products and customer service.  Dell is on the way back, in the view of this consumer.

Now if they only get Steve Jobs to license them Apple's OS X Leopard...

P.S.  I decided to stick with my order, Vista and all.  Review to follow. 

Comments

[JohnP@Dell]

Michael -- Thanks for sharing the update, and for your business. We indeed are listening more intensely than ever. It helps to differentiate us in a very competitive marketplace, but more imnportantly it can result in a consistently better customer experience. We'll be on the lookout for your review feedback.