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Link: Ro Parra at Dell talks about the customer experience

Ro Parra is senior vice president for Dell’s Home and Small Business Group. Today on the Direct2dell blog, he wrote about Dell’s Response to Wall Street Journal Article:



“Some of you may have seen yesterday’s story that appeared in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Our view is that it only tells part of the Dell story. What’s missing is the progress we’re making against four key areas for consumer and small-business customers: post-sales customer experience, sales customer experience, pricing simplification, and improving how we reach customers through marketing.


“The online community is important to us. More than half of our consumer customers buy from us through the Internet. You’ll be hearing more from me and other members of the Dell blog team about changes we’re making for the better across the business.”


It will be interesting to see what they have to say. (Disclaimer: We have Dell computers at home, among others, and have written here and here about some of my (generally positive) experiences with Dell’s customer support (all, so far, via chat and email).


Click here to see the customer experience posts from Dell’s blog.


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Past blast: Peter Davidson on Being a Good Customer

I was thinking about a recent post on how to complain (and get results), and took a jaunt over to Peter Davidson’s blog, which I like. I remember that, with a nod to a past post from Josh Ledgard, that Peter wrote some time ago on his BeConnected blog about how to be a good customer.



“Sarah Eaton over at my sister blog BeTuitive talks about being a good follower. That got me thinking. I talk about developing tools and systems that help you know more about your customers. In a sense leading your customers. As a customer are you a good follower?”


His Eight Ways to Be a Good Customer (click for more details):



1. Participate in Customer Intuition Systems
2. Speak Up
3. Offer Constructive Criticism
4. Link To Them
5. Comment on Their Corporate Blog
6. Respond to Surveys and Questionnaires
7. Refer a Friend or Colleague
8. Buy Their Product, Service or Experience


Also linked to Peter’s list was this post from The Church of the Customer blog, which looks at hwo to prepare yourself for good customers: here at the top three points, visit the blog to read all eight ways:



1. Have a customer communication system – Allow customers to update their contact information easily on your website. Send a regular email newsletter to your customer list, no less than once a month.
2. Acknowledge customer correspondence – Send handwritten notes to customers thanking them for their letter. No one wins points for form letters with <name inserted here>.
3. Reward constructive criticism – Encourage customers to provide constructive feedback. Make your contact information (phone number, email address, etc.) easy to find on your website. Send customers a small gift for taking the time to send their suggestions.


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Link: Using the Xbox 360 for music, movies, pictures and more

Over the weekend I talked about From the Expert Zone: Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender. A quick visit during a meeting this morning, looking at the Xbox site, showed this connection point on how to… 


Feel Xbox 360 Power


See this link as this page provides more on the features and how to use the Xbox 360 for music, movies, pictures, and more.


Also, see these helpful links from Aaron Stebner’s WebLog:



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Disney: Free Net TV nets “37 million downloads, 1 million visitors a day, 1.5 billion page views”

Last week, CNET News reported that Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, said that their effort to provide current, popular shows has been a success, saying that “free, ad-supported shows are attracting a younger audience that’s more comfortable watching shows on a computer screen than their parents might have been.”


Amazingly, Disney’s Sweeny reported that they had seen “37 million downloads, with an average of 1 million visitors a day, and 1.5 billion page views” over a two month period this summer, when they had Disney Channel shows available on DisneyChannel.com.


And these numbers were hit with kids on summer break: imagine what the numbers will be when kids return home from summer vacation to their broadband connections.


From the article, I found that this data point that watching free TV on the web will improve your memory (seems that Disney is relying on earlier data from June) as I noted earlier this summer. That’s also when I guessed that ABC would extend the free, commercial-supported viewing through the summer… 



“In addition, ABC has experimented with placing episodes of “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Alias” and “Commander-in-Chief” on the Internet for free as part of a two-month trial. That garnered 5.6 million downloads during that period, Sweeney said, and 87 percent of the viewers remembered the advertisements they saw (one episode, for instance, was sponsored by Oil of Olay, and all have only one advertiser per episode).”


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InfoWorld: “Microsoft playing catch-up on Webifying everything”

In InfoWorld Daily today there’s a TechWatch post from Mike Barton (in TechWatch) on the Windows Live QnA service, and more on “a hard look into whether Windows Live is the real deal or not.”

Included is a link to Oliver Rist’s artycle on Windows Live, “What the heck is Windows Live, anyway?” in which he says…

“The here and now [with Windows Live] — for businesses, anyway — is a nice set of security and diagnostic tools and a very competitive Web and e-mail hosting service.”

But as a consumer, I’ll add that in addition to sometimes using the various Live services in Beta, I regularly use Live Search (‘though I like Addy Santo’s MSN Search vs. Google page), Live.com as my home page, Live Mail (as my Hotmail accounts have been updated), Live Local (see this post), and Live Messenger.

From the post today…

“OK, so it is Microsoft playing catch-up on Webifying everything. Too bad Google gets all the glory in this PR-centric world. The ex-MS PR hack Robert Scoble makes some points in A Google Vs. Microsoft Double Standard?, noting Google’s edge with Web-centric bloggers following its media home run with news of its short-on-beef Office rival package yesterday.”

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