Should you care about influentials?
Piaras Kelly argues that Dell should not care about Jeff Jarvis on his blog today. And he goes on to say that what’s really important is not what a few key influentials are saying but what the masses are saying.
Having thought about this topic and having written about quite a bit (here and here), I agree with Piaras - but the lesson learned from the Dell saga is that by not responding they let this whole issue fester beyond control and to the point where people who had been happy with them in the past - like Shel Israel, or myself - to no longer buy Dells and switch brands. Plus, if a newbie is searching for reviews on Dell, I am sure that the results are full of negative publicity.
I think that they could have avoided much of that by being better listeners and by being more responsive.
[Technorati Tags: marketing customer service crisis management]
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 14th, 2005 at 3:33 pm
I said on Kelly’s comments:
As I’ve written, beyond Dell’s relationship with me as a customer who returned a $2k purchase — which, in scale is a problem — no, I agree and have said that I was not an influencer. But when I told my story hundreds — the hundreds you’re looking for — commented and emailed and posted about and linked to my tale with tales of woe of their own. I found myself at the head of a mob with pitchforks and torches. I didn’t influence them or anything. But all it took was one consumer to tell this tale for hundreds to coalesce around it. And that was a leading indicator of the problems Dell is having, problems that came out shortly thereafter with falling customer satisfaction, sales, and share prices. Yes, my relationship with Dell is my issue with Dell. But the hundreds who responded to my tale with their own…. that’s Dell’s problem, big time.
December 15th, 2005 at 2:39 am
I think the problem at Dell existed long before Jeff shined a light on it. It didn’t become a problem when one blogger highlighted it and hundreds more chimed in because if they had been monitoring the problem beforehand via customer service lines or Internet forums, it would have become quite apparent that other people were having problems. I doubt if Jeff was the first blogger to comment on it either, so it is Dell’s own fault for letting this beome an institutional problem.
December 15th, 2005 at 10:56 am
This all throws a much larger issue into the glaring light of those torches (for all us peasants to see)…Companies resistant to or just flat refusing to the “right thing.” From the purely cold-blooded business side - even if they don’t care about little things like integrity - companies need to learn to think past the gross revenues from an individual customer transaction. How much future revenues (and profit) are they losing from a customer they mistreat or ignore?
For example, Sears blew me off with a poorly printed boilerplate “Thanks for your inquiry! Can’t help you! We value your business!” postcard in response to my writing to the CEO about a refrigerator that needed major repairs after only 2.5 years. My family has been buying Sears since there was a Sears. Now, no more, not ever. And, I’m telling everyone about it as well.
Oh - and no, I won’t be buying any Dell products either.
December 15th, 2005 at 1:05 pm
Jeff, Piaras and Mary - thank you for taking the time to post your comments.
I agree that the problem was probably there before Jeff highlighted it. The point I was trying to make is that Dell should have responded more quickly and nip this issue in the butt before it totally went out of control and finally found its way into the mainstream media.
Because let’s remember that not all blogs are created equal. If Jeff complains about it, it will find its way to Yahoo News and other blogs way faster than if some of those other hundreds of bloggers complain about it.
If Dell would grok this and have responded faster, then perhaps I (and I am sure many other people) would have continued to buy Dell products instead of switching to other brands.
August 14th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
You can’t be 75601 serious?!?