My friend Ernie the Attorney writes about why he loves Apple Computer Customer Service and compares it sharply with a bad three-year-old experience he had with a Dell. Apple service has had it's own controversies, but overall seems to be one of the reasons why its rising numbers of users are so passionately loyal to the company.
Ernie is not the first critic of Dell, nor will he be the last. I have vented much personal frustration to the company who seemed to have ruined its own reputation for value by squeezing quality out of its boxes and reputation out of its support hotline. But I think Dell-kicking may be inching to an outdated habit. It's invested $100 million into improving support. It's blog is becoming both useful and interesting to it's user base, and last week the respected reviewers at CNET gave Dell's new Core 2 Duo computer the highest ranking against four competitors. As I've recently written, I thought they did a pretty good job handling the exploding battery fiasco as well.
It's out of fashion to say nice things about Dell. But I am motivated in this blog to shout at companies when it becomes clear they won't listen to their own customers. I feel that the #1 problem people feel about large organizations is that the organizations want all communications to be one-way. In short, they don't listen. I think the evidence is starting to stack up that Dell is trying to listen. Personally, I think this is a survival issue for them.
But I also think that the user wins, if Dell can reverse the course of its long-plummeting downward spiral and I think its worthy of mention.
