Dell: A Company Built on Direct and Open Communications

Timeframe

1996

Company

Dell, Inc.

Contact Name

Manish Mehta

Short Description 

Dell was formed around the concept of being direct – providing products directly to and openly communicating with consumers to ensure the best possible customer experience.  These two factors have converged with the rise of social media to form a unique company culture that integrates listening to and engagement with customers via social media throughout every department and product group, and every step of the purchase path, globally. 

Long Description

Dell, as a company, was formed around the concept of being direct – providing products directly to consumers and openly communicating with customers to ensure the best possible experience.

In 1996, some of the earliest known social properties began appearing on the Internet in the form of forums.  Dell’s leadership team noticed that the company’s products and services were being discussed in CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy online forums and so began listening for opportunities to help these customers.  

Witnessing the level of conversation occurring in forums, Dell’s leadership team decided to establish one of the first online communities hosted by a company.  At first, this revolutionary step was not popular internally at Dell, as the website acted as a lightning rod for negative customer feedback.  However, the negative conversation self-regulated over time thanks to satisfied Dell customers joining and becoming advocates for the company.  From this early start, Dell saw the value in engaging with customers one-on-one, and even in encouraging customers to engage with one another, online and unfettered.

A new phase to Dell’s listening activities occurred in 2005 when blogger Jeff Jarvis coined the term Dell Hell as a result of his poor experience with Dell.  Dell’s leadership team again took action and began engaging via social media in order to assist customers like Jarvis who sought a more direct relationship with the company on web 2.0.  To facilitate a more open and direct relationship with customers, two Dell communications employees, John Pope and Richard Binhammer, began to “surprise and delight” consumers online by reaching out to those that needed support and thanking happy customers for supporting Dell on blogs, forums and social networks.  This program has grown from two team members to almost 50 employees monitoring conversations in nine languages around the world.  This responder group represents the epitome of open communications between a brand and its customers to the rest of the corporate world.

So, to fully integrate listening and engagement throughout the fabric of the company, in November 2009, Dell formed a governance council. This council includes one representative from each of Dell’s 17 departments that is responsible for a listening and engagement program.  By utilizing monitoring software from Radian6, every department employee at Dell has access to online posts relevant to them and their products.  This web-based tool acts as a “radio”, allowing Dell employees to listen to conversations while also giving each department member an outlet for engagement or a “telephone” to talk directly to customers.  Dell also compiles a daily monitoring report, disseminated to more than 500 global team members at every professional level – from CEO Michael Dell to entry-level employees,  which demonstrates conversation trends, the reach of Dell messaging, and conversation tonality and sentiment.  

Despite the prevalence of listening and engagement already integrated at Dell, the company’s leadership team has more groundbreaking programs in the works for the near future, including both team-based and technology-based improvements which stand as a testament to Dell’s dedication to direct and open communication with its customers.

Leader's Effect on Outcome

Dell’s incorporation of a team of Chief Listeners is an integral part to maintaining the company’s listening and engagement program.  Dell’s current Chief Listeners, Logan Lawler and Susan Beebe, are tasked with listening to a broad spectrum of topics relevant to Dell and its customers, analyzing these conversations and then providing insights to colleagues across departments and geographic regions.  

Although Dell is embedding listening throughout the fabric of the company, it recognizes the importance of establishing central leadership positions that analyze the aggregate picture of social media and keep open communication a priority.  For example, the Chief Listeners play a key role in making sure conversation trends that affect multiple departments or no specific department at all are noticed and delegated appropriately for quick resolution.

Impact

Dell’s involvement in social media has impacted product lines, service offerings, customer support procedures and the overall sentiment with which the company is discussed online.  

Product groups receive detailed reports regarding how their devices are discussed online.  These product groups have built a “Five Star Challenge” – requesting that every product team question how to grow current review ratings from an average of four stars to five stars.  These product engineers have taken customer conversations, ideas and suggestions discovered online and integrated them into product design.  By utilizing this valuable feedback, the “Five Star Challenge” is credited with improving the average star rating on Dell.com’s Rating and Reviews site from an average of four to an average of 4.6 stars.

Dell’s Large Enterprise group has harnessed the power of online communities to bolster share of voice for its products and services in relation to competitors.  By listening and engaging with customers via discussion forums, product photos and videos, member profiles, and chats, Dell’s Enterprise Technology Center has influenced new sales cycles and has helped move current sales cycles forward.  In one year, the Tech Center community has experienced a 270% growth in website traffic.

Customer support is a mainstay for technology companies, but through Dell’s listening and engagement program, Dell formed a presence on the microblogging platform, Twitter.com, to help facilitate customer service issues on the social web.  The Twitter account, @DellCares, is facilitated by customer service specialists that search tweets 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in order to discover customers that have product questions, need technical support, and have issues with orders or shipping.  The service specialists also personally thank happy customers.  Of customers that respond after their issue has been resolved, 70% have neutral or positive sentiment towards Dell.

What You Learned

When change is brought to every corner of a company, obstacles are bound to arise.  Dell’s implementation of listening and engagement is no exception to this rule, yet has made significant headway in overcoming failures in its journey for open communication with its customers.

The story that is often credited for helping the company find its voice online, Jeff Jarvis’ Dell Hell posts from his blog, The Buzz Machine, acted as a catalyst for Dell leadership to embrace an open communication policy on social media channels.  Though the company was slow to react to this situation and the subsequent delay in participating on web 2.0, Dell was determined to transform from a laggard to a leader in this space.  As a product of this shift in company culture, the Dell leadership team revisited employee, ethics and compliance policies to facilitate participation in social media.

In order to go beyond reputation management online, Dell needed to build the business case for bringing customer support to social media channels.  The company created a pilot program that sought to measure how online engagement with customers might improve key aspects of Dell’s business including customer loyalty, product innovation and brand reputation.  The Dell leadership team saw strong and positive results that indicated Dell should extend a listening and engagement program across all departments and regions.

Dell’s implementation of a single, online conversation monitoring tool across all departments and regions has also proved challenging.  After evaluating multiple software options, the company chose Radian6 as a monitoring platform.  With teams already using other tools and applications to accomplish their listening and engagement activities, integrating this solution company-wide has proven to be a major hurdle.  Yet, through a diligent training program, Dell is continuing to make progress on-boarding its employees and integrating the tool as a staple in their daily routine.

For Dell, changing company policy and culture in order to create an open relationship between employees and customers online is an evergreen and ever-evolving process.

Related URL

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/default.aspx

Explanatory Screenshots or Videos

Tags: listening, engagement, Dell, open leadership, Dell Hell, Dellcares
Last Modified on: 09/13/2010 03:39 PM EDT