One of the great lessons of the cluetrain era is that your customers are your best customer support agents and marketers if only you allow them … and respect them enough to listen to them. Dell does’t. As we reported the other day, Dell shut its general customer forums… which should be the place for customers to help each other. Dwight Silverman found Dell’s company line:

As for the Customer Care board, many of the non-technical issues posted there can only be addressed by authorized Dell representatives with access to customer information – not by peers as the Forum is designed to facilitate. That said, these questions are best handled through other secure online tools.

Or, clueless Dell, your customers can just blog their questions and answers without you. Or should I say, former customers?

Steve Broback at the Blog Business Summit looks up Dell’s PR company’s web site on blogs and it says:

One refers to an ancient (feb 2003) Fortune article with blog in the headline, and the other assures clients that OutCast is on top of the whole crazy, kooky blog thing:

Blogger Relations
Here’s what every technology vendor fears about blogs: they don’t know what they don’t know. OutCast navigates the confusing world of the blogosphere on behalf of our clients so they can focus on their business. There are an estimated 9 million blogs today, but which ones matter to you? It’s our job not only to tell you, but to help you negotiate that terrain. How do we do this? Remember when News.com was new? Remember when Usenet mattered? We do. So relax. Breathe. Whether it’s radio in the 1920s, TV in the 1950s or the Web in the 1990s, new media is new media.

Except when it’s not media, when it’s customers talking.

Yes, I bought the Powerbook. And, yes, there have been moments when I’ve despaired: It feels like moving to Paris and not speaking French (though it sure is pretty there). There is as much illogic in part of the Mac world as in the Microsoft world. I damned near didn’t get my printer working (and I still cannot get the proper drive installed; I keep installing the installer and then it won’t show up anywhere). I damned near didn’t get my Treo to sync. But I have it. And so, next week, I’ll send the Dell back.

Meanwhile… Dwight Silverman, tech guru of the Houston Chronicle, writes about the saga here:

For at least the last three years, I’ve heard a growing number of complaints from consumers about Dell’s customer service. The gripes run from the basic — confusing phone menus, ridiculous hold times, clueless tech support relying too much on scripts, outsourced call centers with poor English-language skills — to the more complex, including accusations of not honoring the specifics of premium warranties and using loopholes to avoid fixing or replacing defective parts.

I’ve asked Dell executives about this repeatedly, most recently at January’s Consumer Electronics Show. The answer is always either a.) we’re aware of this and we’re working to solve the problem, or b.) we’re aware of the problem and we believe it’s getting better.

But I don’t think it has.

He quotes Ed Bott who says, quite rightly,

I’m writing to express my disgust with the response that Jeff’s series of rants got from other people who have high-traffic Web sites that are run by popular content-management systems (blogs, I think they’re called). These folks seem to think that because Jeff is semi-famous and gets quoted a lot on other Web sites and occasionally has his face on TV to talk about these blog things, he’s entitled to special treatment.

There’s no doubt that Jeff’s high Google juice will result in lots of people reading about his experience. When they do, they’ll get an accurate picture of how broken Dell’s customer service is and how their Complete Care guarantee doesn’t deliver on its promises….

Google Dell customer service problems and you get 2,950,000 hits, with titles like “My unbelievable experiences with Dell” and “How bad is Dell support? A lot!” and “If you have problems, expect no assistance from Dell” all on the first page of results. (And Jeff, if you had done that search before you made the purchase, maybe you wouldn’t have bought from Dell.)

My point is that there is already plenty of evidence available to anyone who knows how to use Google that Dell’s customer service sucks, to put it mildly. Granting special treatment to so-called A-listers only convinces me that A is for arrogant.

A is for absolutely right. Here’s what I said in response in his comments:

I agree that bloggers on whatever list shouldn’t be treated differently. But if Dell were smart, it would use blogs as an opportunity to see what customers are saying … and to fix problems (and get good PR for it)… and to learn about their own products and service…
Dell has people clipping media services to see what Walt Mossberg is saying and, yes, Walt is influential, but he’s not a consumer; he’s a reporter.
On blogs, Dell would find its consumers… including the many thousands who are pissed at Dell. That should teach them something. But it won’t if they won’t listen.

: Jason Calacanis follows the saga here; Steve Rubel does here; Robert Scoble does here.

I haven’t been on the blog because I’ve been too busy trying to migrate from the Dell to the Powerbook. This is the second weekend in a row that I’ve wasted thanks to PCs (and, yes, I blame Dell… if I had the slightest faith that a new machine would work and that their service would work, I wouldn’t be doing this now… wasting time and a great deal of money). No matter what the manufacturer, we would not tolerate this degree of difficulty with cars, dishwashers, and phones… all about as complex as a PC. What a pain.