What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [7]
In the fall of 2007, I went to Dell headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, to interview Michael Dell for BusinessWeek and hear the company’s turnaround story. As we sat down to talk, Dell wasn’t exactly warm—that may just be the way he is (it’s a CEO thing) or the problem could have been me (after all, I was the guy who’d raised hell). He began: “We screwed up, right?” He followed that confession with CEO bromides: “You gotta go back to the root cause and how to solve these things so they don’t occur.”
But eventually, Dell started to sound like a blogger himself. He might as well have had my first law etched in brass on his desk. “There are lots of lessons here for companies,” he told me. “The simple way to think about it is, these conversations are going to occur whether you like it or not. OK? Well, do you want to be part of that, or not? My argument is, you absolutely do. You can learn from that…. And you can be a better company by listening and being involved in that conversation.”
Of course, the company did more than blog to get itself out of trouble. Dell spent $150 million in 2007 beefing up its justifiably maligned customer-support call centers. Dick Hunter, former head of manufacturing, left retirement to head customer service and brought a factory-floor zeal for management and measurement to the task. The company had been judging phone-center employees on their “handle time” per call, but Hunter realized this metric only motivated them to transfer callers, getting rid of complaining customers and making them someone else’s problem. Customers stood a 45 percent chance of being transferred; Hunter reduced that to 18 percent. More frightening, 7,000 of Dell’s 400,000 customers calling each week suffered transfers seven times or more.
Instead of tracking “handle time,” Hunter began to measure the minutes per resolution of a problem. Resolution in one call became the goal. He began a pilot program to reach out to 5,000 selected New Yorkers (if you can make it there…) before they had problems, hoping to replace brothers-in-law as their trusted advisers with a Dell expert. He insisted Dell could have direct relationships with at least half its 20 million customers.
At the same time, technicians were reaching out to bloggers to fix problems. More and more, I saw bloggers post amazed reactions when a published complaint led to contact from Dell and a solution. Adam Kalsey blogged about his problems reinstalling Microsoft’s operating system in an old Dell machine and got immediate comment online from Brad, a Dell customer advocate, who fixed everything. Kalsey then blogged: “I’d heard from Jeff Jarvis that Dell was working hard to reverse their image of poor customer service. It’s obvious that they’re really trying to go the extra mile…. A year ago I recommended that a consulting client not buy Dell hardware (they did anyway). Now I couldn’t imagine recommending anything else. Great work Dell and Brad.” Group hug.
I asked the Dell team whether this approach was efficient, fixing problems one blog kvetch at a time. They insisted yes. When bloggers explained their problems, technicians could get right to the issue. Both the customer and the company saved time and money on the phone.
Dell’s online PR turned around. After starting the program, by Dell’s calculations, negative blog buzz dropped from 49 percent to 22 percent. That is, half the blog posts mentioning Dell had been negative before the outreach began; afterwards, only about a fifth of them were.
There are many lessons to be gleaned from Dell’s saga: the danger of a mob forming around you in an instant if you treat your customers badly, the need to listen to and trust your customers, the benefits of collaborating with them, their generosity as a basis of a new relationship—all topics we will return to in subsequent chapters. But the primary lesson of Dell’s story is this: Though we in business have said for years that the customer knows best and that the customer