Tue. Jul. 25, 2006
Before we established a presence in the blogosphere, we had been reading your thoughts on Dell. Some posts were good, some were bad, but the most concerning were those that were from customers who had outstanding support issues. In April this year, we decided to do something about it: we began monitoring blogs to find customers who needed help from Dell support. We use a mix of common tools like Technorati and de.licio.us along with some internal apps to track these efforts. Sometimes our blog support reps e-mail customers directly when their address is published, or they may choose to post directly to a user’s blog. As part of this blog outreach, I contacted a BuzzMachine reader last week that had an issue with not receiving a follow-up call from a support agent.
Looking at posts specifically related to outstanding issues, not surprisingly, most are negative in nature. Many folks are happy to hear from us (Gaming Hobo, B.L. Ochman, and Jill Pyle); others are really happy (Under Cherry’s Moon); very few aren’t (can’t link to due to profanity). One surprise—customers not responding to our inquiries is a more common occurance than we would have thought (for instance, an update on Renata—a Customer Advocate team member first reached out to this customer in mid-June and a couple of times since then). Of course, with all the "stranger danger" out there in terms of viruses etc., the lower response rate is less surprising. Now that you know Dell is proactively reaching out to you, we hope the response rate will increase.
With the launch of Dell’s blog, we now have another way to connect with users in the blogosphere. As most of you know, we direct your support requests over to some the same people responsible for blog outreach. We originally started monitoring only a subset of English blogs. Just recently, we’ve expanded our search to look through many of the millions of English blogs that Technorati currently tracks. Since we started, we have reached out to hundreds of Dell customers through this program—still a very small number by comparison to other avenues of support, but one we expect will keep increasing over time.
Finding and supporting customers in the blogosphere is a difficult and risky undertaking. It does, however, allow us to address many ongoing issues head on. And when the process results in resolution of a customer issue, we think it’s clearly worth the effort.