Brian Morrissey of AdWeek today writes a story that's spot-on with the book themes entitled "Hearing
Test." He brings us up to speed on Dell's progress since the infamous "Dell Hell" customer service meltdown. Interestingly, Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000 opens up with JeffJarvis Dell incident. Since at incident, remarkable progress has been made. Writes Morrissey
on Dell's first blog initiative:
Pearson's team had a mandate to not only communicate Dell's viewpoint, but to help customers who are having problems. It started with figuring out who was talking about Dell. It turned out quite a lot of people were: over 15,000 posts mention the company per day. So Dell implemented blog-monitoring software from Visible Technologies. Now, when someone blogs about a problem with a Dell product, it's routed to a member of Pearson's team. The unit, acting as what Pearson calls "an early warning system," can respond to as many as 100 posts in a day.
And this on taking ideas and suggestions, long before programs like MyStarbucksIdea.com:
Another focus for Dell has been enlisting consumers' help in improving the company, remaking its online community section to let people answer each other's questions. It takes a page out of the book of social media Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers. If a user posing a question chooses another's answer as helpful, it gets marked as an "accepted solution" to the problem. Dell now lists over 6,000 accepted solutions for a wide range of issues.
Yes, there's hope, and even the largest of organizations can make big things happen with the right level of initiative and leadership.
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