December 17th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
I read with interest a post on Emily Hill’s blog about Dell claiming to have made £6.5m from their Twitter activity. Well done. Dell! Twitter is very useful as a sales channel/tool, I’ve previously written about how it’s been really useful to me in growing KashFlow.
Whilst Dell seem to be doing very well from Twitter on the sales front, they’re doing considerably worse with using it for customer service or brand monitoring. It’s in the brand monitoring stakes that Twitter comes into its own. Where else can you be instantly informed about a dissatisfied customer having a moan about you?
A number of big companies have sussed this out already and are very good at looking out for unhappy customers or would-be customers and nipping the problem in the bud. Some companies even have a dedicated Twitter or social media team that are highly responsive. Whether this two-tiered approach to customer service is healthy or not it a debate for another day.
If you tweet something negative about Virgin Media, Rackspace or (dare I say it) Sage, their Twitter team will pick it up pretty much instantly and do their best to help you out.
Vodafone are a little slower (see “It’s over, Vodafone. I’m leaving you“) but still making an effort.
Dell just don’t seem to care at all.
I had a whinge on Twitter (as you do) about problems trying to place an order with them and then with actually getting an order date that didn’t move every week. Even directing messages directly to Dell didn’t illicit a response.
I’m not alone. @NetHosted has been having, and tweeting about, a whole myriad of issues in dealing with Dell and just gets ignored by them.
By sourcing sales leads from Twitter, they’re only going to make the problem worse. These new customers, by the very nature of where Dell got them in the first place, use Twitter. So if they’re not happy, you can be sure they’ll be tweeting about it.
Watch out for the Dell backlash, it’s coming.
![[Post to Twitter]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Delicious]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-delicious-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Digg]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-digg-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to StumbleUpon]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-su-micro3.png){kind=icon}
Tags: dell, Twitter
Posted in Ramblings, Technology | 1 Comment »
December 8th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
The first thing I do when I first log in to Windows XP is right click the “Start” button go to Properties and set it to Classic mode. It’s what I like, it’s what I’m used to.
So when I recently had a play with Windows 7 it was the first thing I looked for. The option wasn’t there. And rightly so. The Microsoft guy I was talking to convinced me I need to embrace all the new changes and the new way of working with the operating system.
Considering I’ve clung on to a lot of the ways of doing things from Windows NT and ignored lots of the new stuff in XP, it’s quite a big change for me to adapt to Windows 7 what is fundamentally an entirely different OS.
So I’d decided I do indeed need to make a conscious effort to learn to use a new OS.
I ordered a lovely new Dell laptop with solid state drives and Windows 7. After numerous changes to the delivery date and unreturned phonecalls I’ve now given up and cancelled the order.
I asked on Twitter for recommendations for a similar laptop with solid state drives and got deluged with the usual “buy a mac!” responses.
I know lots of people who have moved over from PC to Macs and not regretted it. In fact, I’m not aware of anyone that has done it and regretted it. What has put me off in the past is the big change in how you work with the OS.
But as I’d already made the decision to make the step change from XP to Windows 7, the step straight from XP to the Mac OS looked less daunting than it had.
So I warned everyone in the office that I was going to Regent Street and when I got back I’d look much cooler as I would be a Mac user.
I returned an hour later, no cooler but slightly damper thanks to the great weather. The Mac store doesn’t have the Mac book Pro in store with solid state drives.
So I’m now going to order it online (although perhaps wait until January in case it saves a couple of quid).
I wonder if others, faced with a similar big change in their OS will also consider moving to a Mac?
Tags: dell, mac, windows 7
Posted in Technology | 9 Comments »
