Customer Services & Support

A recent post on the Consumerist pointed to an address to send feedback to Michael Dell, and after I left a comment there (providing a better method for giving us feedback and getting issues resolved) I began to think about how Dell’s efforts in social media have changed since we began.  I was pleasantly surprised by some of the comments there- but I’ll get back to that in a bit.

 If you’ve been reading Direct2Dell for a long time you might already be familiar with the blog outreach program that we started in April 2006. The idea was to take customer support into a realm that it hadn’t been before: proactively contacting people online, in the blogs and forums where they were talking, and work with them on their own blogs rather than wait for them to come to Dell. The early days were filled with learning what did and didn’t work, and soon after the Online Community Outreach (aka Dell Customer Advocates) team was born.

Since the time of John’s post, the team has grown and evolved in ways that I think surprised all of us that were involved in the early days.  One of the first transitions was combining the outreach team in with the team of Dell Community Forum moderators to pool their talents for community in general, given the team’s similar objectives.

Combining the teams was a precursor to what we’re trying to do with the new Dell community. Instead of separate groups that are tenuously tied together, we’ve combined the different pieces (blogs, forums, wikis, etc.) together with a goal of providing a seamless experience for our customers. By unifying the groups that work directly with people online, regardless of where the conversations happen, the hope is that we can more quickly and completely support our customers and bring them into conversations or present the information that is most relevant to them. Obviously we still have a ways to go on that front, but we remain focused on reaching that goal.

Getting back to the Consumerist post- what really grabbed my attention was the number of positive comments that appeared. In the beginning of the blog outreach team our efforts were focused on negative experiences and so the commentary we saw most often about Dell was also overwhelmingly negative. Seeing the positive commentary made me think that perhaps, as an entire company, we are beginning to move in the right direction again. Not all of the comments were positive, but we know that we still have more work ahead of us.

We’re still listening, and we’re still out there looking for ways we can help. These days, our monitoring tools are much more sophisticated.  And while I think our team has come a long way since those early days, there’s no substitute for employees who focus on helping customers and connecting them with useful information.

In November 2006, I wrote my first blog post for Direct2Dell. The purpose was to unveil new design and feature changes to the Dell Community Forum, which had remained in same design since 1999.

Update from Lionel: I know there are questions out there. We've set up an area for you in the Popular Topics section. Take a look at some of the discussions going on in that forum and  or see several "how to" wiki tutorials.

I was excited and naïve two years ago. I knew the community forum site was not perfect—we got private and public feedback to that effect, but I believed in the strategy of getting enhanced tools into the hands of the community and refining it from there. I was naïve in focusing on the technology more than our members. With our launch today, we have worked to make the new site more about Dell’s community members.  Like Lionel mentioned, we’ve published several posts on D2D to preview new functionality enhancements. In doing so, we’ve tried to communicate those changes beforehand and make them posts pretty easy to find for customers who might have missed them before. We’ve also hosted demos of the new site with some of our high-volume users and were glad to see much of that feedback has mirrored what Davet50—one of our Platinum users, had to say:

“It was neat being able to see the new Site layout and features… a lot of work has gone into this upgrade and it shows how much the Dell team wants to make this site the best support and knowledge site on the web.”

Functionality integration was the core idea behind this effort. Now you can access all of the content, across tools like blogs, forums, wikis and more on one platform. Profiles are one of the key things that enable that integration. They allow you to share key attributes and connect with other community members that share your interests. They also provide you an easy way to see your own activity (and that of your friends), across the Dell Community site.

Currently, our community site has about 1.4M registered members, and we expect to get about 250 million visits this year. With that kind of activity, it’s easy to feel lost. That’s part of the reason we established groups, which are smaller networks where members can connect with others who have similar interests. Another change is that on every page of our community site, the top of the page is YOUR information, stuff you care about (your status, favorite content, friends, and groups you join).

We also heard that navigation in our community can be daunting, especially for new members. So now we offer you a choice – navigate by a Popular Topic (a collection of items related to a specific topic on the upper left side of many community pages) or by tool (forum, wiki, blog, gallery).

The Dell team accomplished the community platform by aligning with a technology partner that shared our vision of an integrated platform and putting the community member first. Telligent is our technology partner and worked many months to turn our vision into the new Dell Community site.

One of the many things we’ve learned from social media is that Dell is a better company when we listen and engage with our customers. Keep the ideas and feedback coming our way. More updates and improvements will be coming as we tweak things. Based on your feedback, we will prioritize the improvements. Please join us.

If you've been following Direct2Dell recently, you probably knew that there were some changes coming. Recently, we've shared information about Blogs & Registration, Groups & Galleries, Forums & Wikis and RSS feeds.

All that said, we're finally here with the new Dell Community site-a place where all blogs, forums, wikis and galleries will coexist. Our hope is that this level of integration will connect you with people and information that will help as quickly and efficiently as possible-whether you are looking for support, keep up with the latest news from Dell or researching what kind of computer you need to buy.

If you already have a Dell Community Forum account, sign in. If not, take just a minute to create a new account. From there, you can comment, create ypur personal profile, add friends, have private conversations with other members and more.

Teams of people have worked to get us to this point. Still, we know it's not going to be perfect. We look forward to hearing what you like about the new Dell Community site and most importantly, about the things you'd like to see us improve.

Update: I know there are questions out there. We've set up an area for you in the Popular Topics section. Take a look at some of the discussions going on in that forum and  or see several "how to" wiki tutorials.

With the rollout of our new community experience will come some new functionality. Two of the more exciting pieces are Groups and Galleries.

You’ve perhaps read about the ability to cruise the community by topics of interests. We refer to them affectionately as PopTops. Groups might be referred to as PopTop Minis. They are smaller, more targeted areas of interest for avid users that leverage most of the same tools our topic areas use. A group consists of a blog, a forum, a wiki and a media gallery or some subset of these.

So, along with having a more specific focus than our Topics of Interests, what other benefits come from groups? Groups can be private or public, giving us more flexibility to meet the needs of the community. Groups also have the ability to present individual design and functionality, so one group’s identity can be significantly different than another’s. We also will have the ability to let non-Dell employees have and manage their own groups. This will allow us to invite our partner’s to interact directly with the Dell community on topics of cross-interest and even, should we choose, allow our community members to have a group of their own. This is something we’re considering and may roll out in the coming year.

Since a group can have its own media gallery, we have the ability to allow some types of files to be shared based upon a group’s need. A media gallery offers a place for users to share files with other members of the community, be it a group, a topic or a separate area of interest. Pictures, Office documents, PDFs and more can be shared with the community. Upload, download, vote, comment on and tag files to help yourself and other members of the community. Within galleries themselves, you’ll be able to sort by most recent, most popular, most commented and more.

With galleries comes the ability to ‘favoritize’, to coin a perfectly dreadful term. When exploring galleries, you will be given the option to add a gallery or a file to your favorites. All your favorites will be accessible through your profile and on every page of the site via the minibar, giving you quick access to the areas of the site that you find most useful.

Groups and galleries bring two more ways for the community to find, contribute and share information. Check them out when we launch on Friday and let us know what you think.

As many of you know, we're gearing up to launch our new Community Server 2008 platform that will integrate blogs, forums and wikis, and introduce groups and the ability to rate our blogs and other content on our Community site. In the days leading up to the November 7 launch, I wanted to use the blog to communicate some background about what you can expect. 

From a blog perspective, there's two main enhancements coming your way:

• A user registration process
• A Dell blog aggregator page

A user registration process is something for Dell blogs that's been long overdue in my opinion. Yes, it is an extra step when you first create an account and sign in for the first time, but registration will allow us to publish comments automatically as you submit them. Folks like jervis961 and many others have rightfully said that comment moderation (us reading every comment before it goes live) kills conversation among our users. I couldn't agree more, and am glad to finally be able to join the Dell Community Forum (DCF) and IdeaStorm on the comment front. Once you set up an account and log in, you will be able to comment on any official Dell blog, start a new thread in DCF or comment in an existing one, or contribute to a conversation in a Dell wiki.

The other reason we are implementing user registration is to facilitate the support process. It doesn't take long to figure out that many customers come to the blog seeking customer service or technical support. As a user, you will be able to update your profile with system-specific information like your service tag, which should expedite the support process. You will also be able to see all your comments that you've posted after registration, regardless of what blog posts they originally appear in.

Here's how the registration process will work. On the new site, you will see a banner like this near the top of your screen on any part of the Dell Community site:

If you already have a DCF account, you can login with the same user name and password that you currently use. If you are not a member, you can enter a User Name and click on the Register button. Since the database cross checks against current DCF user accounts, some user names will already be taken. Once you're done, you can login and check the box to log you in automatically, so you won't have to login every time.

The Dell blog aggregator page is a response to another common customer complaint—that blog content is hard to find since we have so many official Dell blogs. The blog aggregator page will show excerpts of blog posts as they are published, and it will show what blog that post appeared in. You can either click on the blog post title to see the full post or click on the blog name to go directly to the blog page where the post was published. Ultimately, since it centralizes Dell blog content in one place, it should make it easier to keep up with as many posts as you choose.

Pretty soon after we launch, we're also going to streamline our blog categories across our blog properties. A common complaint from Direct2Dell readers is that on several blogs, we either have too many categories or the names of the categories do not clearly communicate the type of content to expect.  You can discuss the changes to our Community site on this forum board during our migration.