Michael CEO @ Dell again

Michael returning to the helm is possibly the best chance for a Dell comeback, what is needed is a human face to the business and Michael has the potential to achieve that. In today’s market it’s become far more important to have customer empathy and an image of understanding that is founded on real customer experience. I know from my own experience as a Dell customer that great strides have been made on the delivery of the service and the Direct2Dell blog is a great example of what I mean by developing customer empathy.

As an ex Dell executive I had the pleasure of meeting both Kevin and Michael on a few occasions and I believe that the right leadership boils down to personality. Kevin’s obvious, abundant intellect and organisational skills were brilliant and behind the successful scaling of Dell’s business, whilst leveraging operational costs to the nth degree. But I am sorry to say I never found him inspiring or compassionate, two essential ingredients for leadership. On the other hand I found that Michael exuded these qualities and for such a seriously rich guy – he was far more “human”. My guess is he really appreciated Kevin’s skills and track record as COO and assumed that was what was the magic ingredient needed to lead the business. Now the processes and organisation are fundamentally in place it’ll be down to Michael to add the necessary humanity to win the hearts of his customers. The moral has to be “You can’t buy customers goodwill you have to win it by building their trust.”

Not Dell again...

I’m not sure if it’s great to be posting how my daughters notebook had a second major fault within 4 weeks - but twice now Dell have delivered a great service experience. On the first occasion they replaced the motherboard, this time the screen went. It seemed like they were unrelated faults.

Once again the call centre was very polite, helpful and arranged the engineer visit the next day. They followed up with confirmation emails and a double check to see if all was well today. The engineer phoned first thing to advise me of his expected arrival time, allowing me to plan my day. The job was completed inside 20 minutes and everyone here is happy. The same can’t be said for BL Ochmans second experience with her Dell service.

It felt to me like someone cared about my experience and was doing as much as they could to manage the situation and it wasn’t one of their “top honchos” that BL Ochman had resorted too. The secret of providing a great service is being able to repeat it every time to meet everyone’s expectations. That requires everyone at all levels in the service delivery organisation doing their bit to make it great.

Dell is Successful!

At least as far as BL Ochman’s support challenge and my own recent Dell service experience.

Seth Godin suggests that success is about keeping your promises. This is another way of saying you must manage and meet (or preferably beat) the expectations you set. Not just your customers’ expectations but your own objectives too. As with my earlier post about “solutions” being a glib marketing response to “problems” – the real issue here is determining the goals in the first place.

Setting goals is a whole subject in itself but one goal that is always held up in today’s society is wealth. I recently heard a great definition of wealth that went something like this: wealth can be measured by the time you could continue to live by the standards you want, without having to work. I think this a neat definition as it copes with almost every perspective I can think of and yet it is still measurable – provided you can fix what standards you want to live too!

The NEW Direct Model

Dell has built a highly effective customer proposition around their direct transactional business model. Not only does it save on the channel margins but it enables ideal stock management, which in turn drives additional cost savings. I hardly need to repeat this remarkable story, except to add that customers are not just interested in price these days.

It is possible to view traditional broadcast customer communications as working through another multi layer channel. Advertising agencies, PR agencies and media organisations introduce several layers of complexity each with their own profit requirement.

The internet cuts through these layers directly connecting customers and companies and blogs especially create a two way dialogue, which builds key relationships. These relationships are instrumental in driving future business (through evangelism) and protecting existing business (through loyalty).

Obviously in the direct communications model there are savings on “channel” margin, publication and media costs. However there are additional costs in time and resource. Nevertheless for many organisations I believe this new direct approach offers potential market advantage and improved ROI over traditional broadcast communications, which today are becomeing less and less efffective.