It looks like Dell has learned an expensive and difficult lesson about consumer blogging. After a customer service row has been enacted online in the blogsphere, it has instigated a new policy to deal with unhappy consumers. But at what cost to its corporate reputation?
The company was accused of ignoring bloggers, and ignoring the growing body of discontent with its products. Over the past few months, Jeff Jarvis used his popular Buzzmachine.com blog as a platform to name and shame the company. Jarvis first wrote about the topic in June, and continued posting updates through the summer.
Most recently Jarvis wrote an “open letter" to Chairman Michael Dell, calling for the company to heed the growing band of dissent online over its poor consumer relations.
In his post, Jarvis points to evidence that Dell has suffered a slump in customer service, market share is shrinking, and share price dipping.
A pretty powerful argument that Dell’s business is drifting.
BuzzMachine frequently receives more than 5,000 visitors a day. According to Itelliseek’s BlogPulse the posting was the most linked to post in the blogshpere last Thursday.
Subsequently, Dell spokeswoman Jennifer Davis told Shankar Gupta in Online Media Daily that the company will now monitor blogs. And when they see a problem crop up, she says, the details will be passed-on to the customer service department, who will contact the blogger directly to try to resolve it.
"Obviously, Mr. Jarvis' experience could've been handled better," Davis said.
As for other bloggers, Davis said that ideally, when customer service receives forwarded complaints from bloggers, representatives will approach them directly to diffuse the problem. "That's certainly what they're supposed to do," she said. "I can't comment that it happens 100 percent of the time, but that certainly is what the process is designed for."
As a case study, it’s a powerful example of the blogsphere having an influence on corporate image and reputation - the Jarvis blog was picked up by numerous other blogs, and by journalists who wrote about it in newspapers and magazines. Dell appear to have been slow to respond and therefore exacerbated the problem.
However, another interesting debate has sprung up on BuzzMachine – if Jarvis had been a lower-profile blogger, would the result have been the same? Is the blogsphere an egalitarian community where all bloggers wield equal consumer power? That may be the dream / intention – but I don’t think it’s true.
Matt
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