What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [6]
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.
“If you join the conversation your customers are having without you,” I concluded, “it may not be too late.” At last count, there were more than 600 responses to that blog post alone from fellow customers. One said: “I didn’t know Dell had dropped the ball as far as quality was concerned. A few years ago, I would still be in the dark. The new grapevine is a great thing for consumers.”
That was that, or so I thought. But eight months later, in April 2006, Dell began doing what I suggested and what others said would have been expensive and impractical: The company dispatched technical support staff to reach out to bloggers who had complaints, offering to solve problems, one at a time. Guess what happened: When technicians fixed bloggers’ issues, Dell was rewarded with pleasantly surprised blog buzz. Bad PR turned good. Dell discovered that, contrary to what skeptics thought, this direct conversation with customers was an efficient way to learn about problems and solve them.
That July, Dell started its own blog, Direct2Dell. It got off to a rocky start, doling out promotion of the company and its products and not addressing the many elephants in its room. But after a few weeks, chief company blogger Lionel Menchaca entered the discussion with disarming directness and openness, linking and responding to Dell’s critics and promising: “Real people are here and we’re listening.” He publicly discussed the case of an “infamous flaming notebook”—a computer whose battery exploded and caught fire rather spectacularly, pictures of which had sped around the internet (leading to a recall that also hit other computer manufacturers). He brought in other executives to be answerable to customers for ecommerce, product design, and, yes, customer service. The company dispatched staff to read blogs and comment on them. Later it enabled customers to rate and review products—positively and negatively—on Dell’s site. Dell was listening and it was speaking in a new and credible human voice.
In February 2007, Michael Dell ordered the launch of IdeaStorm, a site where customers could tell Dell what to do, discussing and voting on the community’s favorite ideas. There the company not only listened but acted. Customers wanted Dell to make computers for consumers with the open Linux operating system instead of Microsoft Windows. Dell’s people fretted about problems that could arise if they installed one flavor of Linux versus another, but customers told them which way to go. Dell worried about supporting the new operating system, but customers said there was a community in place to handle that. Today, Dell sells Linux computers. In a later interview, Michael Dell acknowledged that selling Linux machines might not be a huge business, but it was an important symbolic act, the mark of a new partnership between company and customer.
I don’t mean to take credit for Dell’s transformation, only to note that Dell was now doing everything I had suggested in my open letter: reading and reaching out to bloggers, blogging itself, enabling customers to tell the company what to do, and doing it. So I had to give Dell credit: It was on the right road. Dell had joined the conversation.
The following April, I met Dell blogger Menchaca, who’d read on my blog that I was headed to Austin, in Dell’s backyard, for a conference. He invited me out for beer with colleagues. On the way to the bar, Menchaca called his mother and told her that he was going to meet that blogger, Jeff Jarvis. Her response: “Are you sure you’re going to be all right, dear?” My reputation had preceded me. But the Dell team came unarmed, as did I, and they convinced me that they had learned