The Customer Experience

"Every public company tells shareholders how it's doing every quarter," says Paul Bell, 39, senior vice president for Dell's home and small-business group, who is a member of the Customer Experience Council. "But few companies have a set of metrics that measure the customer experience month to month, quarter to quarter." So the company decided to track three major elements of the customer experience: order fulfillment, performance, and service-and-support. Then it picked one metric to represent each element. For order fulfillment, Dell tracks "ship to target": How often does a completely accurate order get to the customer on time? For performance, Dell follows the "initial field-incident rate": How often does something go wrong with a system once it has been delivered? For service-and-support, Dell measures something called "on-time, first-time fix": How often do service people arrive on time, and how often do they fix a problem on the first visit? There are dozens of other metrics that Dell follows -- such as the "initial soft-incident rate," which reflects how often customers merely think that they have a problem -- but when it comes to capturing the customer experience, those three metrics are the ones that count. Dell aimed to improve each metric by at least 15% last year, and it succeeded.

Where does the Web fit in? During 1999, there has been a major emphasis on moving more of the company's tech support to the Web. Shifting to online support not only saves Dell money; it also helps the company generate more revenue. Web-based service frees up phone reps to deliver in-depth consultations. "We used to measure how many calls we could take per hour," says Manish Mehta, 30, senior manager of service-and-support online. "Now we focus on first-time resolves -- solving the problem once and for all -- even if that means talking longer with a customer."

Mehta explains the role of his group by declaring, "We own the customer experience once the machine leaves the factory." Lately, the group has been designing online innovations that enable consumers to solve their own problems. One of the most compelling forms of service is self-service, Mehta argues. That's why Dell hosts a bulletin board where die-hard customers answer questions for other customers at the rate of 400 to 500 per day. The Dell site also features a massive database of FAQs and other documentation, along with a natural-language search engine (called "Ask Dudley") that handles 50,000 inquiries per week. Mehta is now testing an automated-response system to analyze incoming support requests. The system attempts to answer about 30% of those requests on its own, passing along the rest to support technicians (who almost always respond within four hours). So far, the system has had an 86% success rate with questions that it attempts to answer.

If numbers matter at Dell, one number may matter more in the future than any other: each computer's "service-tag number." It's a five-digit alphanumeric code that describes the model, the amount of memory, and the configuration of each machine that Dell sells. Today, customers can visit Dell's Web site, type in their service-tag number, and find out whether their PC is ready for the year 2000 -- or learn how they can upgrade their machine to the latest version of Windows. Eventually, Dell envisions using the service-tag number to track the software that customers have running on their machines (with their permission, of course). That way, if a customer wanted to purchase a flight simulator, for example, Dell could specify how much additional memory would be needed.

"That sort of thing -- helping customers add accessories or software when they're between PC purchases -- is what separates the people who understand the customer experience from the people who don't," explains Gregoire. "That shows the difference between offering a great experience and selling a commodity, and that difference turns into real dollars."

"Our challenge is to instill a companywide commitment to the customer experience," he continues. "It's like the way Disney teaches its people to be aggressively friendly: 'Can I help you find something?' Our metrics give us a read on the experience that we're delivering and on the loyalty that we're creating. We're doing pretty well, but we still feel like the tallest midgets in the forest. We know we can do much better."

Scott Kirsner (kirsner@worldnet.att.net), a Fast Company contributing editor, is based in Boston.