DELL HELL

In 2005, a blog titled “dell hell” made a major impact to DELL.
Actually, in those days, I tried to buy new DELL PC, but, because of this word – “dell hell”, I gave up buying DELL’s, instead, I bought Sony PC -VAIO.
What dell should have done to deal with this problem or this kind of power blogs?

If I had been the CEO of dell, I would have carried out through 1) customer service and 2) marketing activity from customer’s claim

1) customer service

Swift and through customer follow up are basics of business. No matter how wonderful service/products we provide, without taking care to customers or following up them, those companies cannot survive. Also, no matter how excellent business plan/strategy we make, if it ignore customer, it does not make good business sense. In any business, we should carry out hands-on approach ( = watch & understand customer ), instead of desk theory.
Conversely, if we can deal with customer claims well and carry on through customer follow, we can get high customer satisfaction and regular customer. I was drilled this notion by my boss and keenly felt the importance of customer follow from my experience.
My company, Ricoh – OA Equipment Company, highly focused on customer satisfaction. Actually, the products of Ricoh, such as copiers and printers, are not so sophisticated, comparing to CANON or XEROX copiers, but, thanks to Ricoh’s customer oriented strategy, Ricoh competes well with them.

2) marketing activity from customer’s claim

Japan is thoroughly focuses on service country and if there are any problems on service/products, no matter how tiny ones, customers claim to them. I think, thanks to this high service/product quality and business creation from customer’s claim, Japan accomplished high economic growth. A good example is Panasonic. Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic, I respect him as the best entrepreneur, extremely focused on customer needs and when there were any claims from customer, he thanked for them and promptly reflected these claims and requests to their products. Then, Panasonic was able to get high customer satisfaction and expand their business globally. As we can see from this case, managing customer requests/claims leads to big business success. I believe that customer oriented company is the best strategic company.
In the first place, customer does not claim to the company in which they are not interested, which indicates that customers hope to improve its products/service.
In that way, the claim from the blog of Jeff Jarvis is good business chance and if I had been the CEO of dell, I would have reflected his advice to future business in DELL.

Owing to the development of blog, we are very lucky because we can get customer’s real request or claims efficiently. We should get well along with power blogs. They give us good business hints & chances and are treasury business.