Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

A couple of years ago, Jeff Jarvis blogged about his frustration with Dell's customer support. He wrote Michael Dell an open letter. It created a firestorm known as Dell Hell.

For Dell it has a happy ending. Dell started listening to its customers, giving conversations with them and turned things around.  It has totally changed the way they think about their customer relationships.

Now here’s the follow-up from Jarvis himself in Business Week. It's one of the best cases of the impact both positive and negative that social media can have on a company.  In the words of Dell’s CMO Mark Jarvis (no relation): "By listening to our customers..that is actually the most perfect form of marketing you could have.’”

Several Organic's responded to this thread with their own stories.  Tim Willison wrote: "I've got to agree that Dell's service quality has become fantastic. I bought an XPS laptop a little over a year ago. Two days out of warranty the battery gave up on me.  I called expecting to do battle. 'Forget about that warranty date', the service rep said, 'you warranty will expire after this phone call.'"

Frank Ribitch countered: "My most memorable call was for a fan that was failing in a laptop. It made a loud grinding noise, and simply needed to be replaced. The support agent read word from word from their script and asked me if I had tried to upgrade the systems firmware to correct the issue. This is a question that Dell always asks, and would have no affect at all to part experiencing a mechanical failure."

Has Dell turned the corner when it comes to customer service?

Adam Turinas and Mike Hudson