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Sunday, June 13, 2010

Dell Hell...what to do?

The main question aswered in this short blog: What to do when a company is confronted with a complaining customer who has a certain level of influence on the public opinion.

After reading the entire story about Dell Hell by Randy Cassingham the answer is clear to me. In a perfect world Dell would have tried to get to the root of the problem rather than to treat the symptoms, meaning try to really help out the customer at the first go with a trained specialist who can make a sound analysis of the problem, give a fair deadline for the solution and deliver an adequate solution on the promised due date. But we do not live in a perfect world and in my opinion this is as valid for Dell as for most if not all big companies. To some aspect I can relate to the cost-benefit model that lies behind these choices.

But once you do make the mistake of getting someone with a certain public infuence ticked off, than try to minimize the damage. Everyone makes mistakes, as in the Dell case. More important is how do you solve them. In my opinion Dell should have put much more effort (and much sooner) into making their unhappy customer a fan of the company again.

As long as the customer is complaining to a company it means there is still a relation between customer and company. This in turn means that there is still a possibility to restore that relationship. In this case Dell should have invited Randy to their company, showing him how their production process works, how come mistakes are made, what they try to do to solve them as good as they can and ask him where in his opinion they can improve this. Of course they need to follow up by also really implementing some of his suggestions.

By making someone part of the process in which mistakes are made and trying to let them create solutions for these problems, they will get involved enough to understand things can go wrong. For instance think about car drivers in traffic complaining about pedestrians and vice versa. In the same person there can be a car driver complaining about pedestrians as vice versa. It depends on where their envolvement lies. Both pedestrians and car drivers make mistakes in traffic, but as humans we tend to blame the ones that are the furthest from where our involvement and engament lies.

In short: Make you biggest critic your biggest fan and Dell Hell will turn into Dell Heaven!

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