Dell used to have a reputation for quality, convenience and price, combined with peace of mind, thanks to their expensive, but reliable customer support. They made an emotional connection with the PC buyer.

Their recent woes are again highlighted by Business Week. This is more than a “PR” or even a “Customer Services” story. Dell have lost the emotional connection with their buyers due to their failure to deliver on their promises. Blogger Jeff Jarvis has been instrumental in bringing to wider notice a systematic and deep-seated malaise in Dell’s quality assurance and customer service. Plenty of people had issues before Jeff did, and continue to have them today. Read the comments at the bottom of the Business Week story for evidence. Jeff was simply responsible for bringing the issue in front of the mainstream media. Here at Market Sentinel we are quick to bang the drum for blog monitoring, web watching and encouraging companies to use the right tools to respond to PR issues, but in this case to reestablish the emotional connection they have lost Dell have to fix the problem of underdelivery first and then talk about it in the blogs and the forums.

It is significant to note that Dell’s stock price is down, due to stalled growth. The weight of negative commentary coming out of messageboards and blogs has yet again proved to be a reliable leading indicator of stock price. If you would like to benchmark your own company or someone else against its competitors contact us to hear about Market Sentinel’s “Net Promoters” index - based on the work of Frederick Reichheld - we can help you establish whose stock you should be buying, and whose you should be selling.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2005 at 4:23 am and is filed under Frederick Reichheld, Dell, web monitoring, Reputation management, Online detractors, Market Sentinel. 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.