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Customer Service Musings
Sep. 6th, 2012 05:19 pmI was reading an article the other day about how Dell is really struggling in the modern PC marketplace because of the changing emphasis to tablets, smartphones and the like.
Today I spent a bit of time researching a new laptop for a colleague. In the old days (a couple of years ago when I bought the Dell I'm typing this on) you could go to the Dell site and design the machine you wanted - how much memory, disk, and so on. It was a great service that the other sites didn't offer. It is so much better to buy a computer when you can spec it exactly the way you want it and can do all the necessary price vs feature tradeoffs.
Now on the Dell (.co.nz) web site what you get are a bunch of pre-packaged configurations - i.e. the same as everybody else. The only real customisation you can do is change the colour of the lid. (I'm not counting the after-market add-ons that they try to sell you - that just makes it worse).
Could it be that Dell's problem isn't the changing marketplace but the fact that they have forgotten their roots and left behind the customer service that got them into the top position that they are now losing.
This consumer marketing musing brought to you by my guilt in not posting here in forever.
Today I spent a bit of time researching a new laptop for a colleague. In the old days (a couple of years ago when I bought the Dell I'm typing this on) you could go to the Dell site and design the machine you wanted - how much memory, disk, and so on. It was a great service that the other sites didn't offer. It is so much better to buy a computer when you can spec it exactly the way you want it and can do all the necessary price vs feature tradeoffs.
Now on the Dell (.co.nz) web site what you get are a bunch of pre-packaged configurations - i.e. the same as everybody else. The only real customisation you can do is change the colour of the lid. (I'm not counting the after-market add-ons that they try to sell you - that just makes it worse).
Could it be that Dell's problem isn't the changing marketplace but the fact that they have forgotten their roots and left behind the customer service that got them into the top position that they are now losing.
This consumer marketing musing brought to you by my guilt in not posting here in forever.