Give the people control and we will use it
Before getting to Googleâs laws, allow me to start with my own first law, learned on the internet:
Give the people control and we will use it. Donât, and you will lose us.
That is the essential rule of the new age. Previously, the powerfulâcompanies, institutions, and governmentsâbelieved they were in control, and they were. But no more. Now the internet allows us to speak to the world, to organize ourselves, to find and spread information, to challenge old ways, to retake control.
Of course, we want to be in control. When donât you want to be the master of your work, business, home, time, and money? Itâs your life. Why would you cede control to someone else if you didnât have to? And once lost, wouldnât you take it back if given a chance? This empowerment is the reason we get so much angrier today when we are forced to wait on hold for computer service or at home for the cable guy or on the tarmac to get to our destination. It is why we lash out at companiesânow that we canâon the web. But it is also why, when we are treated with respect and given control, we customers can be surprisingly generous and helpful.
Many good books have hailed the rise of the new, empowered customer. In this book, we ask: What should you do about it? How should this power-shift change the ways companies, institutions, and managers work? How do you survive? How do you benefit? The answerâthe first and most important lesson in this bookâis this: Companies must learn that they are better off when they cede control to their customers. Give us control, we will use it, and you will win.
Dell hell
Here is a case study in Jarvisâ First Law involving Dell and me. But it isnât about me, the angry customer. It is about how Dell transformed itself from worst to first in the era of customer control. Dell had been the poster child for what you should not do. Then it became a model for what you should do.
After I quit my job as a media executive and left my expense account behind, I had to buy a new laptop. I bought a Dell, because it was inexpensive and because Dell had a reputation for good customer service. To be safe, I paid extra for at-home service.
From the moment I first turned on the computer, it had problems. Iâll spare you the excruciating details of my shaggy laptop story. Suffice it to say that the computer had a number of bugs and I tried to fix them a number of times, spending countless hours on hold with people in faraway lands. Though I had paid for in-home service, I had to send the machine in to get it fixed, only to find something new wrong every time I got it back. Each time I dared to contact Dell, I had to start from square one: Sisyphus on hold. I never made progress. It drove me mad.
Finally, in hopeless frustration, I went to my blog in June 2005 and wrote a post under the headline, âDell sucks.â Now thatâs not quite as juvenile as it sounds, for if you search Google for any brand followed by the word âsucks,â you will find the Consumer Reports of the people. I wanted to add to the wisdom of the crowdâwhich Google now made possible. I wanted to warn off the next potential customer who was smart enough to search for âDell sucksâ before hitting the buy button (which I should have done in the first place; the knowledge was there, at Googleâall I had to do was ask). There were already a few million results for âDell sucks.â Mine was just one more. I didnât think I could fix my problem this way. I didnât think anything would come of it. But I got to vent steam. And that made me feel better. If I had known that my post would spark a popular movement and PR avalanche, I might have been more temperate in my language. But, hey, I was angry. This is what I blogged:
Then something amazing happened. At first a few, then a score, then dozens and hundreds and eventually thousands of people rallied around and shouted, âWhat he says!â They left comments on my blog. They wrote blog posts elsewhere and linked to mine, spreading my story to thousands, perhaps millions more, and expanding Dellâs antiâfan club. They emailed me, telling me their sad sagas in excruciating detailâand some continue to email me to this day.
The tale took on a life of its own as links led to more links and to a broader discussion about blogs, customers, and companies. We bloggers decided this was a test: Was Dell reading blogs? Was it listening? Houston Chronicle tech columnist Dwight Silverman did what reporters do: He called Dell to ask for its policy on blogs. âLook, donât touch,â was the official reply. If customers want to talk to Dell, the spokeswoman said, they should talk to the company on its site, on its terms. But Dellâs customers were already talking about Dell away from its site and control, on their own terms.
Soon, my blog posts were appearing progressively higher in Google search results for Dell, reaching the precious first page, only a few slots behind the link to Dellâs home page. The conversation about my blog post was beginning to damage Dellâs brand.
About this time, Dellâs vital signs began falling. Customer-satisfaction ratings fell. Revenue results disappointed analysts. The share price dove, eventually losing half its value from about the time this saga began. That wasnât entirely my fault. I swear it wasnât. Though some have given me credit or blame for cutting Dell down to size, itâs not true. I hardly did a thing. All I did was write a blog post that became a gathering point for many of my fellow frustrated Dell customers. They now stood beside me brandishing pitchforks and torches, brought together by the coalescing power of the internet, blogs, and Google. They were the peopleânot meâwho should have been heeded by the company and by the analysts and reporters covering it. They told the real story of what was happening to Dell.
Two months after my Dell hell began, in August 2005, BusinessWeek told the tale in print. Under the headline, âDell: In the bloghouse,â the magazine wrote:
About this time, I managed to get a refund for my laptop, though not as the result of blogging. I had sent an email to the companyâs head of marketing and, for snarky good measure, its chief ethics officer. The nice and patient lady whose job it is to talk to the irritants who get through to vice presidents called to offer help. She reached me on my mobile phone, I swear, just as I was in a computer store shopping for my Mac. She offered to exchange my computer for a new Dell laptop. I told her that I had lost trust in the companyâs products and services and just wanted my money back. She gave it to me.
And so, that August, I shipped the machine back and believed my Dell odyssey had ended. In what I thought was the final act in my silicon opera, I blogged an open letter to Michael Dell offering sincere and, I believed, helpful advice about bloggers and customers, who are more often now one and the same.
I told him about my fellow customers whoâd chimed in with their complaints. I suggested he should have internsâbetter yet, vice presidentsâreading what the world was saying about the company in the blogosphere. I also mentioned the big-time press, including BusinessWeek, that had picked up the story. Mocking Dellâs own commercials, Fast Company magazine turned customer complaint online into a verb: âYou got Dellâd.â
But the tale I really loved, which I recounted in my open letter, came from Rick Segal, a blogging venture capitalist in Toronto who sat next to a couple of bank tellers in his office buildingâs food court and heard them discussing the saga. That is how easily things spread online. Segal blogged the scene:
Segal had his own advice for Dell. âThe pay-attention part: Lots of people (Dell?) are making the assumption that âaverage peopleâ or âthe massesâ donât really see/read blogs so we take a little heat and move on. Big mistake.â My advice for Dell continued with four simple tips:
- Read blogs. Go to Technorati, Icerocket, Google, Bloglines, Pubsub, [search engines for blogs] and search for Dell and read what theyâre saying about you. Get it out of your head that these are âbloggers,â just strange beasts blathering. These are consumers, your marketplace, your customersâif youâre lucky. They are just people. You surely spend a fortune on consumer research, on surveys and focus groups and think tanks to find out what people are thinking. On blogs, they will tell you for free. All you have to do is read them. All you have to do is listen.
- Talk with your consumers. One of your executives said you have a look-donât-touch policy regarding blogs. How insulting that is: You ignore your consumers? You act as if weâre not here? How would you like it if you gave someone thousands of dollars and they ignored you? Youâre not used to being treated that way. Neither are we. Itâs just rude. These bloggers care enough to talk about your products and service and brands. The least you can do is engage them and join the conversation. You will learn more than any think tank can ever tell you about what the market thinks of your products. But go to the next step: Ask your consumers what they think you should do. Youâll end up with better products and youâll do a better job selling them to more satisfied customers who can even help each other, if youâll let them. Itâs good business, gentlemen.
- Blog. If Microsoft and Sun and even GM, fercapitalismsake, can have their smartest [executives] blogging, so why shouldnât you? Or the better question: Why should you? Because itâs a fad? No. Because it will make you cool with your kids? No. Blog because it shows that you are open and unafraidâno, eagerâto engage your consumers, eye-to-eye.
- Listen to all your bad press and bad blog PR and consumer dissatisfaction and falling stock price and to the failure of your low-price strategy and use that blog to admit that you have a problem. Then show us how you are going to improve quality and let us help. Make better computers and hire customer service people who serve customers.
âIf you join the conversation your customers are having without you,â I concluded, âit may not be too late.â At last count, there were more than 600 responses to that blog post alone from fellow customers. One said: âI didnât know Dell had dropped the ball as far as quality was concerned. A few years ago, I would still be in the dark. The new grapevine is a great thing for consumers.â
That was that, or so I thought. But eight months later, in April 2006, Dell began doing what I suggested and what others said would have been expensive and impractical: The company dispatched technical support staff to reach out to bloggers who had complaints, offering to solve problems, one at a time. Guess what happened: When technicians fixed bloggersâ issues, Dell was rewarded with pleasantly surprised blog buzz. Bad PR turned good. Dell discovered that, contrary to what skeptics thought, this direct conversation with customers was an efficient way to learn about problems and solve them.
That July, Dell started its own blog, Direct2Dell. It got off to a rocky start, doling out promotion of the company and its products and not addressing the many elephants in its room. But after a few weeks, chief company blogger Lionel Menchaca entered the discussion with disarming directness and openness, linking and responding to Dellâs critics and promising: âReal people are here and weâre listening.â He publicly discussed the case of an âinfamous flaming notebookââa computer whose battery exploded and caught fire rather spectacularly, pictures of which had sped around the internet (leading to a recall that also hit other computer manufacturers). He brought in other executives to be answerable to customers for ecommerce, product design, and, yes, customer service. The company dispatched staff to read blogs and comment on them. Later it enabled customers to rate and review productsâpositively and negativelyâon Dellâs site. Dell was listening and it was speaking in a new and credible human voice.
In February 2007, Michael Dell ordered the launch of IdeaStorm, a site where customers could tell Dell what to do, discussing and voting on the communityâs favorite ideas. There the company not only listened but acted. Customers wanted Dell to make computers for consumers with the open Linux operating system instead of Microsoft Windows. Dellâs people fretted about problems that could arise if they installed one flavor of Linux versus another, but customers told them which way to go. Dell worried about supporting the new operating system, but customers said there was a community in place to handle that. Today, Dell sells Linux computers. In a later interview, Michael Dell acknowledged that selling Linux machines might not be a huge business, but it was an important symbolic act, the mark of a new partnership between company and customer.
I donât mean to take credit for Dellâs transformation, only to note that Dell was now doing everything I had suggested in my open letter: reading and reaching out to bloggers, blogging itself, enabling customers to tell the company what to do, and doing it. So I had to give Dell credit: It was on the right road. Dell had joined the conversation.
The following April, I met Dell blogger Menchaca, whoâd read on my blog that I was headed to Austin, in Dellâs backyard, for a conference. He invited me out for beer with colleagues. On the way to the bar, Menchaca called his mother and told her that he was going to meet that blogger, Jeff Jarvis. Her response: âAre you sure youâre going to be all right, dear?â My reputation had preceded me. But the Dell team came unarmed, as did I, and they convinced me that they had learned from the blogstorm around them and were using it to build a new relationship with their customers.
In the fall of 2007, I went to Dell headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, to interview Michael Dell for BusinessWeek and hear the companyâs turnaround story. As we sat down to talk, Dell wasnât exactly warmâthat may just be the way he is (itâs a CEO thing) or the problem could have been me (after all, I was the guy whoâd raised hell). He began: âWe screwed up, right?â He followed that confession with CEO bromides: âYou gotta go back to the root cause and how to solve these things so they donât occur.â
But eventually, Dell started to sound like a blogger himself. He might as well have had my first law etched in brass on his desk. âThere are lots of lessons here for companies,â he told me. âThe simple way to think about it is, these conversations are going to occur whether you like it or not. OK? Well, do you want to be part of that, or not? My argument is, you absolutely do. You can learn from thatâŚ. And you can be a better company by listening and being involved in that conversation.â
Of course, the company did more than blog to get itself out of trouble. Dell spent $150 million in 2007 beefing up its justifiably maligned customer-support call centers. Dick Hunter, former head of manufacturing, left retirement to head customer service and brought a factory-floor zeal for management and measurement to the task. The company had been judging phone-center employees on their âhandle timeâ per call, but Hunter realized this metric only motivated them to transfer callers, getting rid of complaining customers and making them someone elseâs problem. Customers stood a 45 percent chance of being transferred; Hunter reduced that to 18 percent. More frightening, 7,000 of Dellâs 400,000 customers calling each week suffered transfers seven times or more.
Instead of tracking âhandle time,â Hunter began to measure the minutes per resolution of a problem. Resolution in one call became the goal. He began a pilot program to reach out to 5,000 selected New Yorkers (if you can make it thereâŚ) before they had problems, hoping to replace brothers-in-law as their trusted advisers with a Dell expert. He insisted Dell could have direct relationships with at least half its 20 million customers.
At the same time, tech...