BuzzMachine

Here’s a MySpace tale of a Dell customer who’d had it and was contacted by one of the customer-service people now assigned to respond to bloggers, John Blain. When she was dealing with Blain, life was good; when she got back to the outsourced machinery of alleged customer service, it was not. But then Blain fixed it. At the happy ending, she writes:

And he wrote to me as if I was a person, not going by a script or any of that other bullshit.

There it is, there’s the essence of good customer service: to people as people. Chug-chug on the Cluetrain.

BL Ochman has‘ the tip of the day for Dell on the occasion of its plummeting stock:

Wake up Michael Dell! Your company is sick and you’re the guy who can restore confidence in it. Not a marketing guy, not a PR person, not any spokesman … you. No platitudes. No philosophy. No corporate speak. You! What the hell are you waiting for?

Andrew Krucoff snaps a picture of Amanda.

Dell obviously now has a troop of service people reaching out to find customers’ problems on blogs. They pleasantly surprised B.L. Ochman (even if she wasn’t similarly welcomed at the Dell blog).

They even wrote to me — yes, grouchy old me. I got an email last week, while on vacation, noting that in an 11-month-old post I’d complained that my remaining working Dell, my son’s was overheating. I was on vacation when I got the email and not online much, so I figured I’d respond when I got home. The rep, John Blain, then left a comment on the blog pointing my attention to his email. I responded via email yesterday, saying that I very much appreciated his offer. But in the 11 months since that post, we’d given up on the Dell and my son switched to a Mac. Blain won’t give up. With a dogged diligence that would make Columbo proudn, he emailed back insisting he wanted to dig into the case: “If you or any member of your family was indeed treated unfairly, it needs to at least be looked at, and if possible, corrected.”

Bravo, Mr. Blain! And good for you, Dell.

Sometime ago, I suggested that this strategy will pay off in a few ways:

First, you will spend money on customer-service time with these customers anyway; why not reach out to them directly? I’ll bet this will end up being more efficient.

Second, you will get good PR on the web. See B.L.’s post above and this one right here.

Third, you’ll keep customers you might otherwise lose — if you get to them before it’s too late. I’m a lost cause. But others aren’t.

I know there were lots of fears about doing this: How can we handle all these problems? (Well, you’d better find a way to do it anyway?) What will people say about us? (They’ll say much nicer things if you try to help them than if you ignore them.) What if they’re just asses who can’t be pleased? (Well, you’re getting nice words out of even me now, aren’t you?)

Soon after I posted my first complaint about my Dell and my utter failure at getting service through regular channels, I said this was a test to see whether Dell was listening, whether they would respond to customers on blogs. They weren’t.

But now they are listening. This outreach to your customers — not bloggers, customers — is far more important in my view than starting your own blog. This will yield the real dividends: happier customers, better reputation, stronger brand, more learning.

So thanks for your offer, Mr. Blain. It may be too late for me. But it’s never too late to listen to your customers. You can’t solve every problem Dell has. But you can solve some. Give yourself and your boss a pat on the back.

By the way, when I went searching in my messy email for Mr. Blain’s email, I found another, similar email from Dell a big earlier. I didn’t even see it, frankly, because I get so many emails about Dell I can’t read them all. But I want to note that they started this outreach before they started the blog. And that’s good.

A very good story by Simon Avery on the state of Dell.

Forget consumerism. We’re not just consumers anymore, as Doc Searls has taught me well. We are customers with our money in our fists, spending it wisely and joining together to spend it more wisely. And we are producers who can compete with the companies that thought of us as mere consumers.

So nevermind caveat emptor. This is the age of caveat venditor — let the vendor beware — and caveat creator.

But too many of the the venditors and the creators don’t realize it. Witness this open letter to me from Amanda Chapel, a PR person calling herself the Strumpette, who is desperately trying to fend off the ratty masses now known as empowered customers at her clients’ gates. She is emblematic of old one-way companies and of the PR people who tried to protect these companies from their customers with a shield of spin.

Chapel is disgusted by the whole Dell Hell affair and because of it she calls what I write the Communist Blogifesto and calls me “some malignant corporate subversive” (which, I suppose, beats “worm“).

Listen to yourself: “behind me a mob with pitch forks and torches storming castle Dell;” “we are the bosses now;” “companies have the opportunity to hand over control to customers.” That’s not inspiring a “conversation” comrade; you’re yelling “fire” in a crowded peasant theatre. And that’s it! This is all really about audience and venue. The “revolution” you promote is about a mob and leveraging its disappointments, hopes and fears. . . . What “Wake up Corporate America, You’re Being Watched” is all about, is inciting a riot and boldly trying to hold the theatre owner hostage. The message is clear: “Surrender your property, or else!”

No, we’re just leveraging our money, our property, our collective buying power, our wise crowd, and our voice. If we get good products and value for our money, we’ll buy more and can now tell others to do so; we can market your products, if they’re any good. But if we get bad products and service and value for our money, then we have every right to be mad and to warn others — our friends.

That’s not a mob, ma’am. That’s a market.

Chapel insists that companies should not care about their customers, only their stockholders (whom she mistakenly lumps together as “the bank”).

As it relates to Dell, you think Michael Dell gives a shit about you. He doesn’t. He reports to the bank. He cares about Wall Street. I, the stockholder, am his main concern.

I respond in her comments:

Michael Dell may very well not give a shit about me or his customers. Seems so. But if that is the case, then he won’t have much of a company anymore and he will ill serve his stockholders (not bankers).

No, you’re wrong, the customer is ultimately in charge. It’s my money. I won’t give it to Dell because I don’t trust Dell. I know more people who won’t either. He doesn’t run a monopoly; he’s not in charge of the cable company, phone company, or even newspaper. We have choices. That is the ultimate power.

And she responds, in turn:

No. That’s a fallacy. He should care about a good product and an identified market. That does NOT necessarily mean individual customers. . . .

You have one vote. I suggest then that you don’t buy Dell. Period.

Anything more than that is an attempt to hold Dell and its shareholder hostage. We don’t owe you anything!

You — since you to speak for Dell — owe me a product that works. You owe me service that serves. You owe me reliability and value. You are the ones holding me hostage; you have my thousands of dollars and I have your bad products. I not only have the right but the responsibility to tell others about my experiences with Dell.

But I’ll say again that I didn’t organize that mob. The mob organized itself; I merely provided the convenient town square on which to light those torches. This is how the internet works: It brings us together and we learn from each other.

You see, in the old days, you could screw one customer with one bad product or you could insult one customer with bad service. But no more. Now, when you deal with one customer, you deal with all customers.

That, ma’am, is the real public relations. That is dealing with your public as your customers.

And that is the real branding. Your brand is your reputation, your trust, your value. You don’t own your brand; your customers do.

But Chapel hates such talk. She says:

In business, “control” is a fiduciary responsibility. Stock is property. Management is paid to increase the value of shareholder property AND to act as custodians. It is a “duty.” Simple as this: this whole “ceding control” and “open borders” mentality, at the very least, threatens shareholder property. Hype aside, the downsides of your revolution are fairly predictable and surely greater than the yet-to-be-measured upsides. Imagine shareholder activist(s) sharing the podium fully with the CEO. That’s just plain silly. It will happen the same day the CEO decides to blog the annual meeting. NEVER!

Here she is mixing the roles of customer and stockholder. But nevermind. Let’s keep going:

Here, this is the linchpin to your whole argument. You grossly overestimate the value of the customer relationship. Excuse me, businesses don’t really want “relationships” with their customers. It’s too expensive, it’s too messy and the return is nominal at best. Not even the most prolific hooker wants a personal relationship. Our job is to anticipate needs/wants/desires and then present clients with something special. If I did my homework, I will be rewarded; if not, I will be punished. The money is on the dresser. End of transaction.

No. Business Week reported recently that the stocks of companies that have a reputation for building strong relationships with customers outperform those of the rest of the market. Your customers are your business, damnit. And businesses that don’t understand that — monopolies aside — will die miserable deaths.

But what you are proposing is actually more than an added burden of a personal relationship… it’s a platform that actually servers to organize the wackos. It gives them (you) a big microphone to express social retribution. You expect me to let you and your mud-booted-torch-bearing mob into my house?! If I run out of shotgun shells maybe.

What’s that empty clicking sound I hear? We may be wackos or worms but we have the money you want. Nya-nya-nya.

It’s amusing that Chapel calls all this communism. It’s the ultimate in capitalism. Capitalism is all about choice and we can choose not to give our money to companies that give us bad products or treat us badly or even that do not listen to what we want.

Chapel concludes:

Which brings me to how I, the stockholder and Michael Dell’s boss, would have responded to you, Edelman and friends, and your reaction to Dell’s new blog. I’d have ordered the thing shut down immediately. I’d fire the idiot who launched it in the first place. As you noted in your letter to Mr. Dell, he closed down one of his consumer forums and has a corporate policy of not talking to your customers on blogs. Michael’s smart. And he’s doing exactly what we pay him to do.

What we see here is not only the death of the old f-you company but also of their court jesters, the old-style flacks. Painful to watch, isn’t it?

: LATER: Scott Karp does an excellent job cutting through the crap and clouds to get to the point:

eff Jarvis and Amanda Chapel (aka Strumpette) are going at it over the Dell issue and in the process are stirring up such a heavy cloud of ideology that it’s hard to get your bearings. I thought it was worth trying to boil it down to some simpler, less ideologically-colored observations and lessons:

- Companies used to be able to get away with making crappy products and offering crappy services because they were able to mass market people into submission and because consumers didn’t have a way to make their unhappiness widely known.

- Thanks to the proliferation of content (both “professional” and “consumer-generated”) and content channels, mass media and thus mass marketing are now dead, so there is no longer an effective way to sell crappy products and services.

- Through blogs, video sharing, and other platforms for cheap content creation and distribution, individual consumers now have a powerful way to spread the word on crappy products and services on a large scale.

The lessons for companies:

1. Make better products and offer better services, or your business will likely suffer.
2. If you make mistakes, listen to your customers and fix the mistakes.

There it is a nutshell, without a single “ism.”

I think his second bullet, about teh lost of an effective way to sell crappy products and services, is important and new to this discussion.

Dell bloggers, I hope you are prepared for a sure flood of comments from customers with their specific sagas of woe. You’re going to have customers who will want answers to their own problems or who will want to hear about changes at Dell that will solve the problems they’ve had. It’s starting already. See this comment:

So please use this blog to tell us, *specifically* what is Dell doing to improve in this area? When will we, as customers, see significant change in this area? Is there light at the end of this long dark tunnel?

I see the Lionel Menchaca, the digital media manager, answering a few comments and that’s good. But you’d better be prepared for a mob.

I never intended to form a mob of unhappy Dell customers. They formed themselves. When I wrote my original post on June 21 last year, my only intent was to add to the wisdom of the crowds you find when searching Google for the wisdom of the pissed-off crowd, the true consumer reports you find when you look for any brand followed by the word “sucks.” But the response was incredible. That original post got 253 comments (which are now, unfortunately, broken); thousands more came in with comments to later posts, their own blog posts and links, and emails. The mob coalesced around my complaint with their own complaints; that is how the internet works. To this day, I get plaintive emails, comments, and links from people telling me their own stories and frustrations in the hope that I can help. I can’t, of course. It’s evident that I am the last person to have a link to Dell.

Just yesterday, I got an email from a nice minister — a gentle man of the cloth — who said:

please… omg… please help with a Dell question.

Not the ‘oh, my God’ reference from a pastor. The man’s desperate.

I, too am in Dell Hell right now…

Note the ‘hell’ reference. He knows whereof he preaches.

…something that has NEVER happened to me in working for at least 10 years with a dell machine. I have been so very happy up to now. I feel the only way I can get my point across is to write directly to Michael Dell … the problem? nowhere on their website can I find his information or his office’s info. please help, for the link on your website that i thought might go to it has been removed from their website. thank you in advance for your help.

I told him that I couldn’t help. As near as I can tell, Dell changed its email address structure after I got to a vice president’s person; that veep seems to have left anyway; and that veep’s person has not responded to other people I sent her way (she even refused to help me again should I have continued to be a Dell customer).

So I told the good padre to go to the new Dell blog because now they’re listening. He’s doing that I’ll watch with interest the rest of his tale.

Now I know someone at Dell will say that the company already has forums and phones where people are supposed to come. But as Laura Bosworth admitted on the Dell blog yesterday– and good for her — those systems aren’t working. She also warned that there are no magic wands to fix it. That’s fine.

But I guarantee that a mob will gather outside your door and if they don’t think they are being heard and don’t see reason to hope for improvement, they will get louder and pick up their pitchforks and torches and then we’ll hear people say, well, this is what happens when you venture into the frightening blogosphere. But on the other hand, if you deal with these people and their problems directly, you can win them over.

Can you respond to and solve every single problem in every comment and blog post? Probably not. But I’d start tackling the problems, one by one, in public, referring to the specific customers and their sagas. Dig into the problems; get to the employees they dealt with; be open with your own phone and customer records; talk to the managers involved; admit the problems; apologize; hear well what your customers are trying to tell you to help you — think of this as reporting on yourselves. Then share your solutions. Then track your solutions.

And be aware that your employees are reading, too. When they see you get to the bottom of a specific case, they will realize that they are being watched and not by their own cubiclemates — ‘this call may be recorded…’ — but by your customers.

Of course, a blog alone won’t solve Dell’s many problems with customer service and quality; you have to do that on your own. But it can help.

The latest post on Dell’s blog finally addresses the dead, decomposing, stinking elephant in the room: customer service. Laura Bosworth, director of customer experience (a thankless job if I’ve ever heard one) says:

The good news is that we know what we need to do. You’ve been telling us. Our number one priority is to get better at problem resolution. I can almost hear the collective “duh” out there as I write this. . . .

Now that’s more like it. I have no idea whether their efforts will be successful; that elephant is mighty smelly. But they are finally addressing the real issue they should be facing in a conversation with their customers. And in the comments, the customers start right in with specific complaints. I’ll be eager to see how they’re addressed.

Try to do it daily. You create a stir and get people to come back to your blog to see what you have to say next, so have something to say. Your group blog has had two posts in seven days. Habits are usually daily. Just trying to be helpful. Think of this as my customer service.

Well, golly, look at this. I get a comment‘ on the post below from someone who says he’s working for Dell:

Hey Jarvis. I honestly think you have no life. Honestly? Do you have a life, or do just spend it trying to make Dell miserable. I’ve been working with Dell the past three weeks researching trashy blogs that worms like you leave all over that frigen blogosphere and I cant honestly say that Dell is trying to take a step towards fixing their customer service. They hire guys like me to go on the web and look through the blogs of guys like you in hopes that we can find out your problem and fix it. But honestly I dont think you have a problem Dell can fix. Your problem is you have no life.

The guy who left that post was too chicken to leave his or her last name. But Chris did leave his or her domain and it does, indeed, come from GCI Group, a division of Grey Worldwide, the giant ad agency. GCI brags that it is working for Dell, “Rebuilding Corporate Reputation Through Grassroots Effort.”

Yes, I guess that we worms without lives live down in the grass roots.

Yes, Dell is doing a great job getting in the conversation.

And yes, I quite enjoyed his apparent typo: He can’t honestly say that Dell is trying.

I just emailed Jeff Hunt, CEO and president of GCI group, asking what the company and this Chris dude are doing with Dell. I’ll let you know his reply.

: Oh, and Chris, dude, if you want to see the problems I’ve had with Dell, you can start here and then go here. See a summary here or an open letter to your client, here. Oh, and I still own some Dells that don’t work. We just don’t use them anymore. We’re an Apple family now. Apple: Computers for worms.

: LATER: I just got a response from Paul Walker of the GCI Digital Media Practice, employer of “Chris.”

Jeff Hunt forwarded your e-mail to me and asked that I look into the comment posted on your blog from a GCI Group IP address. I looked into the matter, and I can confirm the comment was left by a summer intern who got caught up in the emotion around your postings. This afternoon he obviously decided to let you know what was on his mind. In afterthought, he likely would choose his words more carefully. It is important that you understand the intern’s comment in no way reflects the points of view of Dell or GCI. Dell’s aims with its one2one weblog are positive and they have every intention of making it a forum for open conversations with Dell customers.

Fair enough, Mr. Walker. But, you see, this is exactly the issue Dell — and any company — has in all its customer interactions in the age of customer control: The person who answers the phone — or now responds to a blog post — is acting on behalf of Dell and to the customer is Dell, since that person is our connection to Dell. See the AOL cancellation video. Every one of your “customer service” employees and every one of your “public relations” employees in every encounter represents your company. That has always been the case. Only now, we can record their actions and report them to the world. There are many Chrises in many companies. The fact that they feel they can treat customers this way is a good indication, though, of the culture and management of the companies that employ them.

: I want to add that I hope young Chris does not lose his or her poor-paying internship. I’m sure that Chris, in fact, speaks for many people at Dell when it comes to what they think of me and perhaps other bloggers. Fine. I want transparency, I want conversation, this is the transparent conversation. Let’s have it. No more pussyfooting. The customers and the customer-service representatives have a real dialogue. The public meets the public relations company. No one-way mirrors. No hold buttons. No Muzak. No fake supervisors. Chris: Coffee’s on me, young man or woman.

: Here’s PR magnate Richard Edelman’s take.

Well, well, Dell’s blog just linked to this blog; that’s a first. It came with a snippy snipe, but I’ll overlook that; I’m sure they have a lot of that stored up after the last year. They said:

Yesterday was the first official day of Dell’s one2one weblog and already Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel were kind enough to tell us what we’re doing wrong. Thanks for the feedback, guys. We’ll keep working to get it right.

Shel Holtz weighed in a bit more constructively. Our intention with this blog is to address issues that are important to our customers. Give us some time and we’ll prove it. Robert Scoble told us to listen, and to link to the folks who don’t like us. First step was to launch Dell’s one2one. Check. We’re excited to be here, and we welcome your ideas.

Four links and counting.

I responded in a comment (not yet approved):

Glad you’re here. But Scoble is right: The first step is to listen to the conversation about Dell that is already going on in blogs. You want constructive advice? Let me repeat…

This is what I advised on my blog more than one year ago, on July 1, 2005: I said Dell needed to learn “…about how their customers now have a voice; about how their customers are a community — a community often in revolt; about how they could find out what their customers really think; about how they could fix their customers’ problems before they become revolts; about how they could become a better company with the help of their customers. If they’d only listen.”

Your blog policy at the time, the Houston Chronicle’s Dwight Silverman found out from your spokesman, was “look, don’t touch.” But now you’re touching. Well, that’s good. But giving us a blog that just tries to sell us the wonders of Dell is not entering into the conversation.

Someone there should have the guts to deal head-on with the now-renowned customer service problem your company has. Be brave. Be direct. Be transparent. Blog about your hold time. About your customer service satisfaction ratings. About your return rate. About your reliability. Go out and quote the blogs that are writing about you every day and then answer their problems, concerns, and questions. Best yet: Ask your customers what we think you should be doing. That would get you respect. That would be a real conversation.

If you want more advice about what a Dell blog could be and could accomplish, I know I’m one of many who’d be happy to oblige.

: I just found my open letter to Michael Dell, in which I gave fuller advice:

1. Read blogs. Go to Technorati, Icerocket, Google, Bloglines, Pubsub, and search for Dell and read what they’re saying about you. Get it out of your head that these are “bloggers,” just strange beasts blathering. These are consumers, your marketplace, your customers — if you’re lucky. They are just people. You surely spend a fortune on consumer research, on surveys and focus groups and thinktanks to find out what people are thinking. On blogs, they will tell you for free. All you have to do is read them. All you have to do is listen.

2. Talk with your consumers. One of your executives said you have a look-don’t-touch policy regarding blogs. How insulting that is: You ignore your consumers? You act as if we’re not here? How would you like it if you gave someone thousands of dollars and they ignored you? You’re not used to being treated that way. Neither are we. It’s just rude. These bloggers care enough to talk about your products and service and brands. The least you can do is engage them and join the conversation. You will learn more than any think tank can ever tell you about what the market thinks of your products. But go to the next step: Ask ask your consumers what they think you should do. You’ll end up with better products and you’ll do a better job selling them to more satisfied customers who can even help each other, if you’ll let them. It’s good business, gentlemen.

3. Blog. If Microsoft and Sun and even GM, fercapitalismsake, can have their smartest blogging. So why shouldn’t you? Or the better question: Why should you? Because it’s a fad? No. Because it will make you cool with your kids? No. Blog because it shows that you are open and unafraid — no, eager — to engage your consumers, eye-to-eye.

4. Listen to all your bad press and bad blog PR and consumer dissatisfaction and falling stock price and to the failure of your low-price strategy and use that blog to admit that you have a problem. Then show us how you are going to improve quality and let us help. Make better computers and hire customer service people who serve customers.

It sounds so simple, so downright silly, doesn’t it? But that’s what you’re not doing now. And that’s why you lost me as a customer. But if you join the conversation your customers are having without you, it may not be too late.

Sincerely,

Jeff Jarvis

P.S. I have one Dell left in the house, my son’s. And just last night, he said he had to buy a fan to put under his machine to suck the heat out so the graphics card won’t overheat and slow down every time he plays a game. He looked online and found that people have complained to Dell… but no one would listen. Do you hear us now?

P.P.S. My son and webmaster is now very happy with his MacBook Pro.

: Some contrarian folks‘ think other bloggers and I aren’t giving Dell enough time and slack. Sorry. They’ve had a year to figure this out. They’re smart. They have money. And this is the best they can do out of the gate? This is not about blog orthodoxy. This is about consumerism. They’ve been screwing their customers and they know it — why else are they hiring tons of new support people and doing PR about it? — but their first effort to join the conversation is to promote their products and not deal with what people are already saying about them? Sorry. That’s lame. I refuse to see Dell as the poor, pitiful object of sympathy.

: LATER: Steve Rubel gives Dell free advice.

So Dell is starting a blog.

Ha. Heh. Ho ho ho.

It’s a blog in content management system name only.

The subtitle is “direct conversations with Dell” but this is as much a conversation as yelling at a brick wall. There is not one link there. It’s filled with promotions for Dell’s wonderfulness. The top post today from the global director of e-commerce, Manish Mehta, saying:

It is hard for me to believe that it has been 10 years for www.dell.com.

Yes, I think I spent about 10 years on hold with you guys.

But seriously, folks, the first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them. The conversation is already happening out there without you. Join in that conversation. Dell continues to believe that it can control the conversation. That horse is out of the barn, over the horizon, dead, and buried.

At the same time, the Wall Street Journal reports, Dell is starting a new ad campaign that doesn’t emphasize technology or price but people, giving us sagas of satisfied customers who got the perfect machine.

Oh, damn. I just shorted out my Apple with a spit take.

: I really do hate to be so snarky. I really have no ongoing obsession with Dell. They just make it so easy.

And my poor readers are still obsessed with Dell. Just today, I got this email:

Dell service is the worst experience that one can experience……….We switched to Gateway

I get them almost every day still. And every day, I get four or more comments on months-old posts with more personal horror stories about Dell. A random comment today:

I bought 2 dells and couple of my friends also bought dell. All four of us experienced failure within 2 to 3 months of purchase. It tells me that dell is producing cheap like GM used to do. If dell does not know the price you pay for this, DELL can look at GM

Dell isn’t listening. And listening, once more, is the first step in blogging.

: Here’s Steve Rubel on Dell’s blog.

Perhaps it might have been better for them to have stayed silent. Cmon Dell. We know you’re bigger than this. Join us. Be real. Walk the talk.