January 2009 - Direct2Dell

This is more formal than most of my other posts. I'll simply play this one straight.

 Dell has reached a settlement agreement with 47 U.S. states related to certain past consumer practices. The initiatives, which were offered up to four years ago, included a no-interest financing plan, next business-day service contracts, warranty services and rebates. 

Under the agreement, Dell will pay the 47 states a total of approximately $3.85 million to cover both costs of the investigation and refunds to customers. Dell worked cooperatively with the associated state attorneys-general and their staffs and thanks them for their prompt and reasonable approach to resolving these past issues. 

The issues represented only a very small percentage of the tens of millions of Dell consumer transactions in the states during the four-year period. Dell had previously addressed the issues directly with many of the customers involved and many were satisfactorily resolved prior to the states' involvement. Under the settlements, Dell has agreed to additional customer disclosures to make sure that customers are fully informed about its financing and service offers. Some of these changes had been implemented prior to this agreement, and some of the practices at issue are no longer relevant.

Dell's goal is to provide the best customer experience possible. Over the past several years, Dell has invested millions of dollars in customer service and technical support to improve customer experience. Among results of that effort, the company was cited in 2008 as the top provider of customer service among Windows-based PC Makers by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Dell also has opened several lines of communications, including a Web site called Web site called Ideastorm, Dell's community forums or Direct2Dell for direct customer feedback.

For those of you keeping score at CES 2009, you’ve probably seen reaction in the blogosphere to a couple of new products that you can expect to hear more about soon: Adamo and the Mini 10. As far as Adamo, expect it later this year. Precision craftsmanship and design is the name of the game. For more on it, take a look at posts from Engadget—their live blog from today’s event and their hand-on article, Gizmodo, or Crave. Update: I just noticed that Brian Solis has posted some pretty slick Adamo pics in his blog post.

For the Mini 10, I can confirm some things that Gizmodo reported and a few more. For symmetry's sake, here’s 10 things about the Mini 10:

1. Edge-to-Edge 16:9 HD 720p display
2. Edge to Edge keyboard
3. Built-in TV Tuner
4. Built-in Mobile Broadband
5. Built-in GPS
6. Built-in 802.11n
7. Unique multi-touch & gesture touchpad
8. Exclusive gestures: Home Screen, Auto-Scroll and My Favorites
9. Intel Atom Z530 for performance and battery life
10. Expanded color palette and popular Design Studio images

A second update:  Here's a nice preview of the Mini 10 from Techmama Beth Blecherman. And one more update: Take a look at Rob Williams' post over on the Dell IR blog, DellShares. That post features a YouTube interview with Ron Garriques, who is the President of Dell's Global Consumer division. He briefly discusses the Mini 10 and the black and the white versions of the Adamo notebook. He also gives some insight into how Dell is looking to expand our global set of products to meet a variety of needs.

I’m glad to see some folks are pumped. That’s it for now. When I can share more details here I will.

Update: Below is a 20 minute audio-only clip of the January 9 session where Michael Tatelman and Alex Gruzen discussed these new products.

Also, I noticed several folks were upset that I included just the audio-only version. Inc. Magazine published a short video that includes the Adamo sneak peek.

At CES, HP went on about how proud they are of their 24-hour battery life claim against Dell. Well, at Dell we take a slightly different approach - create business laptops with the entire user experience in mind.

Dell commissioned a study from Principled Technologies that compared a Dell Latitude E6400, Lenovo ThinkPad T400 and HP EliteBook 6930p on multiple dimensions. Here are some of the findings:

• After an hour of charge time the Latitude E6400 was 83 percent charged versus 66 percent for both the Lenovo and HP system. This means you get an extra 54 minutes of battery life (on a typical six-cell battery) using Dell's Express Charge for one hour. That is pretty valuable when trying to charge your battery while waiting to board a flight.
• In one hour a person could upgrade the RAM, hard drive and add a mobile broadband card on almost 10 Latitude E6400 systems, versus less than three HP EliteBook 6930p systems and almost four Lenovo ThinkPad T400 systems. We have received a lot of great feedback from customers on our serviceability.

I'm sure that everyone wants to know how battery life testing went, especially since HP has been less than transparent on how they arrived at the ad slogan of 24 hours. In our third party apples-to-apples test using MobileMark 2007 (MM07), we found that the Latitude E6400 went beyond our claim of 19 hours to 20 hours 9 minutes due to continuous improvements we have put into production. Although HP came in at 21 hours 4 minutes (only a 55-minute difference), additional Latitude E6400 features like eSata, contactless smart card reader and ControlVault out-class the competition.  Also, we have an All Day Battery life mode accessed through Dell Control Point software that enables even longer battery life. It is a setting used to extend battery life as needed, but we disabled it for testing in order to comply with MM07 "run rules."

Since we rolled out the new site, several folks have asked about status and points. Dell Community members like zoofence have asked about the point system on our community site. nissi2 also asked about them in his comment. jronesi started a thread in the forum about it.

There are two main components: Status and Points. Think of this like the frequent flyer programs. You can be a Gold member, with 200,000 miles. You status is Gold, your points or miles are your activity. Where we differ from the airlines is that your status does not expire every year.

Status is based on activity once you register. Every time a registered member starts a forum thread, replies to a forum, comments on a blog post; that activity counts towards status. For instance, a new community member is automatically “Copper.” After 5 posts, replies; the status is upgraded to “Bronze”. This metal classification is a legacy status program in Dell Forums. So you will see longtime highly-active members that are Gold, Platinum, or Diamond (top tier).

Points are new with our site. At present you earn points for multiple activities like:

• Posting a forum question
• Answering a forum question
• Creating a new wiki article
• Editing a wiki article; and
• Other various activities.

I have not fully determined how we can use points. One idea is to trade in points for virtual goods. What I do know is that points need to remain separate from status. Your status should remain with you.

As most of you know - Dell sponsors a variety of communities for people to participate in and join in conversations around their specific interests related to technology including IdeaStorm, this Dell Community including Forums, Blogs, and wikis, Digital Nomads, Regeration.org, and the Dell Tech Center. 

Behind each of these websites, you can find and interact with a variety of community ambassadors from Dell.  What you may not know, is that many members of our team are regular contributors in other communities.  A few examples...

• Brad Laurich is Techknow Brad from Dell on Yahoo Answers with a 92% Best Answer Rating. 
• Richard Bernier is quite active across Notebook Forums.
• You can find John B, Chris B and others on Get Satisfaction!
• There are a variety of Dell communities and real people on Twitter including the popular @richardatdell

We'd like to know more about you and the community websites that you enjoy participating in.  Tell us your favorites in the comments of this post.  Who knows - we may even see you there sometime!