Dell Sees Service Improvements But Wall Street Keeps The Pressure On

Dick Hunter, Dell's vice president of customer experience and support, says the company has begun to make strides in fixing customer service issues that have dogged it:

Just as we've been honest about where we need to improve, we think it's fair to point out a few successes. We have a long way to go, and we're not a company that spends much time recognizing successes, but we have seen some positive trends. For instance, the time a customer spends in our call queues has dropped by 70 percent and we've seen a 20 percent improvement in resolution rates. This tells me that we're investing in the right areas.

It would be difficult to pin all of Dell's current problems (declining sales, difficult margins, market share losses) on customer service problems. But the groundswell of discontent toward Dell that emerged on the web certainly tracks very closely with the company's plunging stock price.

Consider: On June 21, 2005, when blogger Jeff Jarvis wrote his first-in-a-series, now-legendary "Dell Sucks, Dell Lies" blog post ripping the company's support, touching off a cascading number of similar complaints by bloggers and web posters, Dell shares were trading at $40.42 on NASDAQ. At the close of business on Thursday, Dell shares were trading at $24.15.

Again, this isn't to say that blogger complaints and customer support issues are the only problems hurting Dell, but at the very least they seem to provide an aura that has hovered around the company as its fortunes have taken a tumble.

This week, UBS Securities and Bank of America both cut back their forecasts on Dell -- focusing more on the company's soft sales and challenging margin issues.

As an aside, Jarvis reports that he met Dell Chairman Michael Dell, face-to-face, at the Davos World Economic Forum last night. He says he'll post more details on that later.

UPDATE: "He apologized for my bad computer."