Dell caught some severe hell over the past year or so and I have to agree with many of their detractors that they were slow to react.  They seemed to be stuck in an old-world customer service/PR paradigm that was a little incongruous for a company that built its business on a "revolutionary" business model.

Well they might have been slow but Dell is beginning to hit its stride.  They’ve launched a customer service blog called Dell one2one that is a great example of how a corporate blog can change the way business is done.  When the blog launched it was criticized by some blog purists and PR/customer service gurus, but just like every other person/entity that ever launched a blog I think the Dell-ers just needed some time to develop their sea legs.  After reading it for a few weeks I think they’ve developed a nice mix of PR (using the space to refute some negative statistics about them) and product updates (here’s what we’re doing about fill-in-the-blank issues).  Basically they’re beginning to open up a window to their operations and if they’re careful and don’t become too defensive I think they’ll find that they will engender more customer goodwill in the process.  Simply by admitting that they’ve made mistakes and do indeed need to improve their customer service (see here) is a huge step in the right direction.

On an anecdotal note I’ve noticed that more people are stepping up to defend them when stories about exploding laptops appear, or at least point out that it’s really more of a battery issue and less of a computer issue, so any company that is supplying customers with computers, PDAs, phones, etc. will have these instances occur. Until recently everyone seemed satisfied with only blaming Dell as if it’s the only manufacturer that has these problems.  I think Dell’s willingness to be more open with its practices is allowing people to see the positive along with the negative, and by admitting that they make mistakes and explaining how they’re working on fixing them they are stopping the negative momentum. Remember it’s human nature to complain about bad service to multiple people but never mention satisfactory service at all so by using its blog effectively Dell is able to answer the negative feedback and then point out positive developments as well. 

A lot of businesses can learn something by watching how Dell goes about this, because if they fail there will be a lot of "this is how you don’t do it" stories and if they succeed they’ll blaze a trail that others can follow.  My money’s on the latter.