That you can’t afford to ignore online commentary about your company, or its products, was the message Dell Asia Pacific and Japan VP director of customer experience Justin O’Sullivan shared with delegates at the TUANZ Contact Centre Conference today.
The multinational company experienced a serious dip in customer relations in 2005 and a key way of turning things around was to tackle its online presence. O’Sullivan says they’d originally taken a “watch and listen” approach to blogs but after one site generated a massive amount of feedback about their products, they decided it was time to respond.
In order to maintain an authentic online profile, Dell began engaging with bloggers and established an online forum for customers. O’Sullivan says the company made changes, including the introduction of Linux as an operating system, as a result of this communication.
Of course Dell with 70,000 employees, of which 25,000 are contact centre staff, might have a wider web presence than organisations here. But the importance of blogs was a key take-home for Contact Centre Committee chair Gay Reed-Barrance at the end of the presentation.
“Have you looked for blogs about your company and, if so, what action are you going to take?” she asked.
O’Sullivan also spoke about more traditional forms of gaining customer feedback, which he called “listening posts”. These included two distinct customer surveys – a relationship survey and an events-based survey which are designed to feed information into Dell’s five metrics for customer satisfaction:
Easy to contact
Get my order right
Deliver on time
Provide a quality product
Fix my issue
Tick those boxes and you have a satisfied customer who will in turn promote your product to others. And despite O’Sullivan maintaining that the measurements are as scientific as possible, he also said at the end of his presentation that good service delivery comes down to an intuitive human interaction between frontline staff and customers.