Jeff Sullivan, Senior Marketing Manager – Online Communities, Dell

SuperNova Award Category

Next Generation Customer Experience

The Company 

Dell  connects with more than 5.4 million customers every day, including large enterprises, public institutions, small and medium businesses and individuals. We ship more than 120,000 systems daily to customers in 180 countries—that’s more than one every second. We are the number one provider of PCs to both public sector customers in the US and large enterprises worldwide, and do business with 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

The Problem

We provided our prospective enterprise IT customers (in different countries, with customers who speak different languages) with educational and support materials, and found that these pre-sales interactions happening in online discussion forums and wikis influenced sales as well as the overall customer experience. These highly technical buyers wanted to learn more about our products, services and people, and we wanted to scale and centralize these conversations on our Dell.com property to extend our influence in order to drive sales and positively impact customer relationships.

The Solution

We built an online community (with community managers and hubs in the U.S., China, Japan and Germany) for ongoing advice and resource sharing between Dell customers and employees. Engineers and IT admins share their expertise, discuss how-to issues, do product research, give product feedback and access helpful resources to better do their jobs before, during and after sales. The community bridges to our social outposts (Twitter, Facebook) and centralizes in-depth and more technical conversations so that customers get more personalized attention to their technical challenges and questions (no easy feat for a global company to execute with customers across time zones and language barriers).

The Results

Based on our initial research, we learned that online interactions influenced a significant portion of both large enterprise public revenue . The pre- and post-sales engagement with our enterprise IT customers in our TechCenter community creates better customer relationships, increased sales and was a key part of our expansion into Europe and Asia. Additionally, we improved our R&D processes by opening up beta products for direct customer feedback, which we can now more quickly and efficiently update within the product . The Open Manage Essentials systems management console that provides simple, basic Dell hardware management was a great example of this effort.  (found here: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/systems-management/w/wiki/1989.o...)

We started with a private forum for a select group of customers in an alpha phase of the product, then later an open beta to the entire community.  Both of these endeavors created a fantastic circle of feedback that led to very successful and well received product launch on the community itself (as opposed to traditional Dell.com product launches.)

The Technology

Telligent Community, Telligent

Metrics

We grew from 50,000 pageviews monthly in 2008 to 850,000 in 2013.  Pre-sales online engagement with customers influenced a significant portion of enterprise and public revenue. Since migrating to the new platform and integrating it with Dell.com, traffic increased 30%, expanding our ability to serve customers globally throughout the sales process and customer lifecycle. In terms of scope and reach, we have more than 10,000 registered members with more than 450,000 unique visitors monthly.

Disruptive Factor

The Disruptive factor of Dell TechCenter is that we focus on TECHNICAL content – no marketing; and secondly, we truly mirror the community -- Instead of community being 10% of time of various individuals in support or other departments, we have dedicated community technologists that have years of experience as actual IT Admins, developers, or engineers. 

Shining Moment

The shining moment was when we found what a large presales impact community was having.  This opened doors inside and outside the company alike.  Add to that, a recent internal survey of the Dell salesforce showed that despite our community’s external target, was viewed as the #1 place for sales teams to find technical content over other intranet/internal training tools.   We were also cited in several articles and even a book for how to do community right:   Social Marketing to the Business Customer

About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. For more information, visit www.dell.com.