Michael Dell And The Bloggers

Michael Dell says complaints by bloggers about his company's customer service are as bad as any other complaint. And don't expect him to start blogging, either.

That was his response last week during a press Q&A following his speech at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The company Thursday rolled out a new, online break-fix service, TechConnect, in which company service reps can remotely fix many PC problems over a broadband Internet connection. Dell said that, in a pilot program, the service reached a 99 percent customer satisfaction rating.

But what about bloggers, who have ravaged the company with bad customer service reviews for the past several months while Dell has done little or nothing publicly to counter all the negative publicity? Has he rethought how Dell views the blogosphere?

"We don't want anyone to have a bad experience, whether they are a blogger or anyone else," Dell responded.

But when a blogger like Jeff Jarvis has a bad experience, he writes about it to tens of thousands of potential readers. And many of them write about it. Thanks to RSS, word spreads quickly and, thanks to Google, it's easy for lots of other people to find.

Jarvis last year popularized the term "Dell Hell" on his blog, Buzzmachine.com, after one of those "bad experiences." His ugly review of the company's products and services even prompted a full-blown white paper. That paper concluded:

Buzzmachine beats Dell itself as a source of information on Dell’s customer services…To put it another way, the stakeholders who are most inclined to single source their news about Dell’s customer services are predominantly using Buzzmachine. This means that they are disproportionately likely to take their information on the topic of Dell’s customer services from someone who is telling a story about a highly negative experience.

But Jarvis isn't the only blogger to write about big problems with Dell. Megan McArdle, who is well-regarded on economic issues, wrote about a grueling experience with Dell – which ultimately was resolved to her satisfaction but is an ugly story nonetheless.

And Eugene Volokh, a California law professor, wrote a lengthy blog item about "appalling service from Dell." He asked for help in picking out a different PC maker to buy from in the future and received many responses.

Michael Dell can talk about all the 99 percent satisfaction ratings in the world, but the one percent is giving his company a ton of bad publicity. And the company doesn't have a base of loyal, local resellers who could 1) stop the problem before it became a problem, and just satisfy the customer and 2) be a trusted, third-party source of information about the company to counter disgruntled bloggers or "anyone else."

Unlike others, Michael Dell simply doesn't have channel partners outside the company who are watching his back.

With TechConnect and new service centers in the U.S. and Canada, Dell has taken steps to shore up its flagging customer service. But Dell himself seemed perplexed when asked whether he, Michael Dell, would actually start a blog (as have Sun President Jonathan Schwartz, Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who blogs internally behind a company firewall, and hundreds of employees of IBM and Microsoft.)

Dell shook his head and said he makes his views known to people inside his company "using a variety of different methods."

So, too, do bloggers.