Dell’s blog hell

Ed Moltzen reports on Dell and the bloggers, following up on Engadget’s report that the topic of unhappy customers with blogs came up during Dell’s Q&A with the press.

Michael Dell says complaints by bloggers about his company’s customer service are as bad as any other complaint. And don’t expect him to start blogging, either….

But what about bloggers, who have ravaged the company with bad customer service reviews for the past several months while Dell has done little or nothing publicly to counter all the negative publicity? Has he rethought how Dell views the blogosphere?

“We don’t want anyone to have a bad experience, whether they are a blogger or anyone else,” Dell responded….

But Dell himself seemed perplexed when asked whether he, Michael Dell, would actually start a blog (as have Sun President Jonathan Schwartz, Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who blogs internally behind a company firewall, and hundreds of employees of IBM and Microsoft.)

Dell shook his head and said he makes his views known to people inside his company “using a variety of different methods.”

So, too, do bloggers.

I emailed Ed and asked how aware of the blog belching Dell and company are. Ed replied that after a lot of talk about how satisfied Dell customers are…

I then reminded him that there is a vocal group of customers, bloggers, who have been criticizing Dell for months and asked him if that changed his thoughts, opinion or strategy in any way.

He answered with the quote I provided, and an extended explanation of what he’s doing to improve customer service.

My sense is that he wasn’t very familiar with the groundswell of complaints from the blogosphere.