Dell Follow-Up
I never did hear anything more about my numerous Dell investments.
So you’ll understand that I was thrilled to meet Bronwyn Patten, Dell’s SA e-Business Manager at the Online Industry Summit today. She is a really cool person and we had a very constructive chat.
The good news is, to all of you who were part of the gold rush, is that Dell realise they probably didn’t handle it all that well and although they know that they can’t, economically, hand out free laptops to the 2000+ individuals who bought them, would like to hear from you!
I plan to meet with the Dell team in the near future – so what would you like me to say? I have a few suggestions of my own but know you lot have a bunch of good ideas too. Hit me…
2000 laptops! wow. I think they could’ve at least sent us some freebies instead. Maybe a flash-drive, dell stickers or something. :-)
I know of a particular award ceremony where 10 individuals will be receiving awards. a dell laptop will go great with each of those awards. 10/2000 = 0.5%
Mike a good one to throw at them would be why they never followed Dell USA’s example when a similar website glitch happened. They honored orders at the erroneous price until stock ran out and gave away 10% discount vouchers to all the unlucky folks – USAToday.
Firstly I seriously doubt that 2000 were sold at R0. If they were then a lot of people ordered more than one in an attempt to take excessive advantage of Dell’s rather obvious mistake.
Just as customers need to be vigiliant to ensure they do not make mistakes with their online purchase, Dell should ensure they front up to their own errors. I would ask Dell why they don’t honour the offer, issue out the laptops but not more than one per person. This gesture of goodwill will cut down the amount they need to handout significantly.
Ask Dell whether this was just a marketing ploy, all those net savvy people who are in the market for Dell computers like you and I now know exactly how to order a Dell laptop online, we now know the site address and how easy it was to actually use the site, an invaluable exercise Dell are probably happy we went through. Then we all blogged about it and reached an audience of thousands of active readers.
The time I spent doing that, what do I have to show for it…….NOTHING, nada, zip….. just a follow up email to my purchase which reeks of poor PR and an apology that was hardly sincere or sympathetic!
Mike – Could you ask them why they don’t make Macs???