Dell Focuses on Customer Service

Business Week talks with Richard Hunter, the new head of Dell’s customer service:

How and why did Dell’s service deteriorate?
In the quest for efficiency, we became efficient but quite ineffective. Management has put rules and regulations and hurdles that the phone agent has to jump through. They’re in the interest of cost, but not the interest of consumers.
For instance, we set up specialized phone queues for consumer Dimension hardware tech support only, and another for small-business Dimension hardware tech-support only. So you would call and a desktop tech would answer, but you have a laptop.
The net result: We were transferring, and still today, are transferring close to 45% of calls. That’s out of a half a million calls from consumers a week. That’s a lot. That’s terrible. It’s like delivering materials to the wrong factory 45% of the time. You could be transferred to four countries. That’s not a good way to do it.
You’ve done a lot of new hiring in the call centers to help cut down the hold times. Just how bad did hold times get?
In the past it was seen as O.K. to hold for eight to 10 minutes. But my goal is to never be on hold more than four minutes. We’ve made great strides. In November, we answered 20% of calls in four minutes or less, and 3,000 callers in a week waited more than 30 minutes. Now, we’ve got 80% answered in four minutes or less. And last week, 80 people waited more than 30 minutes.

Posted by on June 22nd, 2006 at 11:19 am


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