Customer service is an emotive issue for many Dell consumers. My experience on IdeaStorm and Dell Forums has shown me that many consumers have encountered problems with Dell’s customer service. Inconsistent short-term special deals, poorly designed marketing and poor telephone support have left many customers feeling disgruntled and ripped off. The following is my opinion of what Dell needs to do to correct these issues.
Simplify IT!
Dell has made much noise about its campaign to simplify IT. What a shame it is then that this campaign was never extended to the consumer market. This is in fact the first step Dell needs to take. Not because Dell’s customers are stupid. But because communication is so much easier when it is kept simple.
Rather than telling the consumer the potential for the product. Tell them what it is actually for. Tell them what they can actually do with it. Again rather than show off all the potential things we could have with the product. Show us what we are actually getting. Too many times in the past has Dell made promises about products it never intended to keep. The XPS 700 upgrades, the M1330 remote controls and recently LightFX to name a few. Dell needs to focus its message to the consumer. Dell’s consumers shouldn’t have to campaign to make Dell keep these promises.
After-Sales Support
People hate call centers. They make us feel like we’re children getting into trouble for doing something naughty. And when they are overseas call centers the language barrier takes the frustration to intolerable levels.
Dell needs to ditch the overseas call centers in favor of more local call centers. Web-based support should be utilized whenever and where ever possible. Develop a proper on-line knowledge base. I believe customers actually prefer to solve problems on their own. Ditch the Microsoft Internet Explorer centric support tools. Go with open source technologies for support. Adopt open standards on your Web sites. ActiveX does not work for Linux customers! PHP does!
Use e-mail support more often. E-mails give everybody time to calm down and think. Customers can communicate more clearly what they want to say. Tech support can take a little more time to investigate the problem. They can even request log files for examination. Implement an instant on OS like Splashtop. If the main OS goes belly up, then at least the consumer can still get help. There are so many more tools Dell could use but don’t use.
Borrow a few ideas from Linux. Package repositories for drivers and pre-installed applications! How much easier life could be if Dell was more imaginative with it’s tech support.
The call center in the 21st century should be the last resort.
June 25th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Aikewolfie, You’ve touched on some wide-ranging consumer topics that are front and center in our efforts to improve what we call the customer experience.
As Dell’s worldwide director of customer experience, I’d like to thank you for your post. While we’re certainly not perfect, all across Dell we’re listening, learning and acting to achieve customer-centric results more than ever. Hearing ideas like yours are key to continued progress. There is no doubt that it takes longer for our improvements to have an impact than we would like, but this is a journey of many steps.
For example, while overseas call centers continue to be integral to our business, customer feedback and pilots we’ve run tell us premium services like localized after-sale support at a modest price can be an agreeable option. Stay tuned as you will see more on this very soon. Email is another one that we have quite a bit of experience with and surprisingly, we found our satisfaction scores to be significantly lower with email than chat or phone. In general, we found it to be good for really basic questions and not much else. Unfortunately, we did not have a good way to help customers understand when it would be a good medium vs not. It is still in use in some segments and regions but is not as pervasive as it once was. And you’re idea about improving our downloads and drivers is spot on! We are just in the first phase of simplifying your ability to find those downloads and drivers that are only relevant to the system you have. There is still more to do, but at least we are moving forward.
We’re also getting good feedback on a variety of online and community support efforts, from millions of DirectConnect interactions over the Web to the thousands of “accepted solutions” we’ve recently begun to highlight on our customer forums.
While criticism is almost always tough for companies to hear, we take and appreciate yours as constructive. Thanks again for letting us know what’s on your mind.
June 25th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Thanks for reading my post :o) It’s very much appreciated.
The great thing about e-mails is they work on all platforms. No special plug-ins or ActiveX controls needed. I think the trick is getting people to use the right address. It’s my experience people get frustrated with help systems when they need to jump through hoops to make it work for them.
Perhaps it would be a better idea simply to have a single contact address and filter the messages to the right people based on topic heading and content. That way the customer should always reach the right person with the answers they are looking for.
June 25th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Congrats on getting an article posted aikiwolfie. I agree on having more local call centers you forgot to mention local drop off points. Many older people or non techies (my parents come to mind) would love to bypass the do it yourself customer service and just drop it off. I would have suggested Best Buy’s services but a recent bad experience with their warranty service has soured me on them.
June 25th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Congratulations professor aikiwolfie on your article.
@Laura Bosworth, In regards to your above comment on email. It`s still nearly impossible to make the person on the tech support end understand the English language. Their English and our English are two different languages. If some one tries to explain in depth about a problem, their response usually dosen`t even fit the scenario. I have had a lot of experience with this in the past years.
June 26th, 2008 at 2:45 am
CONGRATULATIONS, Professor Aikiwolfie! I would really like to see the changes you recommended. I do not want to see my favorite computer company in a law related situation. Especially with New York State where I live. In fact I am starting to dislike my state and planning to move to New Jersey. But still, I would want My Dell to be My Fave Computer company!
~Dell Fan, AWWang :)!
July 16th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Well thanks for the input people. My blogging will now happen over at http://aikiwolfie.blogspot.com/
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:07 pm
the only thing that i can think of why there are less local call centers in america & more overseas call centers out there is that americans don’t like their work as customer service representatives, american consumers treat their own call center reps very lowly. although customer service or call center support are very vital to the products you buy & i agree on phone support than chat or email. because how can you check your email if your dell system wont boot at all? you will waste your time going to a net cafe to retrieve your instructions & go back home to try out the steps they replied to. how then when that instruction did not work? so you have to go back to that net cafe & reply to their email again, & so on. if i have a product, i want a real person to talk to to describe my problem & can follow directly their steps, especially if the first few steps did not work, then immediately you can get an alternative solution from the phone rep.
Language & accent is indeed a barrier. i just hope they would setup a call center overseas to a very good english speaking country. for example i had an HP system before & i was talking to a phone rep from india & some coming from latin america, WTF!!! i had a hard time understanding them, although the support was great but it took me forever to fix it because we kept on bouncing each other’s sentences. after a few years i got myself an XPS laptop. when i called in for a problem i got a phone rep from india again & other times coming from the philippines. although the support was great, but im much more satisfied with the guy from the philippines, i never thought that he was from the philippines when we were talking to fix my problem. india? the same, great support but took very very long (longer than my HP problem years ago) because of the accent barrier.Worse is that the indian rep was kinda rude compared to the philipino guy i talked to who kept on apologizing to me (which i found quite annoying sometimes).
But to keep the subject matter intact, & my experience with overseas customer support, maybe dell should put more call centers in the philippines because i learned that the philippines’ english language is much better than their own local dialect. their education system is based around the english language as well. besides, didn’t we americans occupied that country 100 years ago & stayed there for 50 years? no doubt that our language & culture made an impact & they are still using that western culture still (this is based on my coworker’s experience as well).
why not put up some more call centers as well in england or australia? they are english speaking natives aren’t they?