Seth wrote in to describe the response he got from Dell recently, and compared it to the response he got four years ago. That was a more innocent time, before rags like BusinessWeek blew the lid on our EECB strategy by printing it in old media that execs would read.

I think readers on Consumerist might find this interesting… with all the emails being sent to executives these days, are they becoming deaf to it? It appears at Dell that might be the case.

A comparison:

Four years ago, I wrote to Kevin Rollins, the then CEO of Dell, about a prolonged problem with a monitor. I received a very quick and friendly reply from Mr. Rollins, which was copied to two other executives. One being Ro Parra and the other I can’t recall. The issue was SOLVED, sincere apologies were made, and I was thanked for letting them know about the problems.

Three weeks ago, I wrote a top-level executive at Dell about a problem with the same product. I received no reply from the executive, but got handed off to something called the customer resolutions center. The representative was curt, unhelpful and misinformed about technology and just about everything else. She even gave me the infamous “I have no supervisor” reply when I asked for hers. When I did speak to her supervisor, he was very professional, but since then has never returned one of my calls.

Apparently, at Dell writing to executives no longer has quite the punch.

Don’t get me wrong–I don’t think executives are required to write back to every customer that emails them. But the message I got from Dell four years ago was crystal clear: customers first. The message I got three weeks ago was… don’t write us, we’ll write you?

I think I’ll stick with companies that welcome hearing directly from customers.

Seth

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