What They Asked us to Do

Dell, a company that relied on excellent phone and online customer support to connect with customers and maintain its low-cost, “build-to-order” business model, experienced a significant backlash in customer satisfaction. The backlash climaxed in late 2005 following negative reviews by the American Customer Satisfaction Index and Jeff Jarvis, a well-known journalist, media expert and blogger. In his post, Jarvis coined the term “Dell Hell” – a phrase that became the rallying cry for thousands of Dell customers frustrated with their Dell experiences. Dell engaged our digital media team to develop a digital strategy to address these issues head-on.

What We Did

We’ve worked with Dell to implement a comprehensive and groundbreaking digital media strategy that fundamentally changed its relationships with customers, employees, digital influencers and mainstream media. The strategy became a Fortune 500 corporate communications standard and contains four phases: listen, influence, engage and community.

  • Listen – For the first step in Dell’s turnaround, we implemented a 24/7 Online Monitoring & Response Program. Designed to address and reduce negative discussion and amplify positive word of mouth online, the program tracks all online outlets in English and Spanish and delivers comprehensive monitoring reports daily.
  • Influence – The second phase helped Dell join the online conversation and build relationships with key influencers. Dell Consumer Advocates is a proactive team of specialists dedicated to 24/7 online customer issue resolution. In addition to reactive outreach, we also proactively engaged bloggers such as Jeff Jarvis and WhatsUpDell to build relationships and influence their perception of Dell through Digital Influencer Relations.
  • Engage – We also created new platforms and digital content to participate more effectively in the online conversation. Direct2Dell, Dell’s first corporate blog, allows for candid, fast, two-way communication with its customers. Dell has since launched Direct2Dell in Spanish, Chinese, Norwegian and Japanese. Through StudioDell, a multi-channel Internet TV site, Dell provides advice and solutions for home, small business and IT audiences to help them get more from their Dell technology.
  • Community – To forge communities for customers to interact with each other and with Dell, we launched Dell IdeaStorm and Dell EmployeeStorm. IdeaStorm is an online crowdsourcing application that allows customers to generate ideas about Dell’s products and services, and ultimately, challenge the way Dell does business. Customers can post ideas, and the community can promote or demote their suggestions causing popular ideas to rise to the top. Dell EmployeeStorm isan internal site that enables Dell employees to share and discuss ideas for Dell’s products, services and business.

Our Results

Through the above social media initiatives, Dell transformed its communication with customers and stakeholders and, in the process, greatly improved its corporate reputation. More specifically:

  • Dell resolved 5,300 customer issues and emerged as a leader in proactive customer relationship management.
  • Direct2Dell averages more than 3.5 million monthly page views, has been cited more than 200 times by mainstream media and ranked 3,683 out of 107 million blogs tracked by Technorati.
  • StudioDell receives up to 70,000 views daily.
  • Dell IdeaStorm garners more than 40,000 unique visitors weekly, 8,900 ideas submitted and 67,000 comments.
  • EmployeeStorm experienced more than 2,700 ideas submitted and 139,803 votes cast, with approximately 22% of Dell employees visiting the site.
  • The October 17, 2007 issue of BusinessWeek featured an article penned by Jeff Jarvis titled “Dell Learns to Listen,” that tracked Dell’s journey from “worst to first” in truly listening to customers and taking real-time action to meet their needs.

Our work with Dell awarded us the 2007 Silver Anvil Award for the Dell Battery Recall, the 2007 Forrester Groundswell Award, and the 2008 PRWeek PR Innovation of the Year for “Dell Ideastorm”.