Our founder and CEO, Michael Dell, said it best: “We’re a company with big ears." Dell became a private company in late 2013 with the sole purpose of taking the concentration away from shareholders and financial results and re-investing the company’s focus on listening to its customers. This renewed focus is embodied by Dell’s social media support efforts. The company became an early pioneer of utilizing social media channels for customer service in 2006, and has continued to innovate in the field ever since. With millions of global followers across multiple social media channels, Dell is at the forefront of creating new technology to interact with, assist and enable our customers. Additionally, Dell understands that social media empowers companies to listen, analyze and engage with its customers and employees – and we have taken things a step further by helping other businesses and organizations connect with their target audiences in revolutionary ways. We couldn’t keep all these handy secrets to ourselves – we had to spread the #DellLove! Being social is ingrained in Dell’s DNA and we continuously listen to our customers and implement real-time solutions based on their feedback. Dell not only educates its own team members on making connections online and leveraging social technologies to add value to their roles, but also serves as a trusted advisor to its partners and broader business customers. Here are some examples of what Dell has done for its customers, both businesses and everyday consumers, over the past year: Building a Customer’s Social Business Strategy Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC), the largest customer-owned health insurance company in the U.S., underwent a dramatic change in 2013 to reflect the groundbreaking Affordable Care Act (ACA), which shook up the insurance industry at its core. Dell worked its magic to help HCSC build an online community strategy to enable the organization to connect with in-need members and customers within the regulated realm of healthcare, which has unique legislative constraints. Widespread confusion on the new national ACA statute made it obvious that HCSC needed to start educating its audience on a larger scale – and Dell was there to help prepare the corporation for the massive influx of questions and fears posed through the social channels HCSC’s members rapidly flocked to. Dell collaborated with HCSC to provide a robust social strategy, held to measurable and quantifiable standards. The social tools HCSC was already using? Dell taught the organization how to leverage them for more value. Dell applied best practices learned from its own experiences in social media, and helped HCSC craft its narrative for its social business with a proactive approach. “Much like what Dell had told us, where they see concerns three days before they hit the call center, we’re now actually part of that mix where we’re doing contingency planning – what messages do we need to put out there, what isn’t working properly. We’re able to be a part of that conversation now and more folks are seeing the value of these channels." - Lynde O'Brien, Director of Electronic Media Strategy and Marketing at HCSC Social Net Advocacy (SNA) The winner of two Social Media Leadership Awards in 2013, Dell’s Social Net Advocacy (SNA) program is a patent-pending social media analytics solution that allows us to quickly digest over 25,000 daily social comments about Dell and convert that information into actionable insights. The innovative program has our customers wondering how such a large company can be so agile and responsive. Dell’s SNA program has also helped large beta customers in 2013, such as Caterpillar and Nissan North America, who are utilizing it to harness real-time data and raise customer awareness. These organizations, known for their in-person business models, understood the need for catering to a whole new generation of socially-active consumers in the digital world. By understanding their overall brand sentiment and the conversations their customers were having online, these companies are able to contextualize the data and incorporate new methods of interacting. Please watch the YouTube video below, explaining how Dell is helping Caterpillar and Nissan understand, prioritize and integrate customer feedback, enabling shorter response cycles and happier consumers. Dell’s Consumer Focus We love to advise our business partners to help them make deeper connections, but there’s no denying that our own customers are extremely active on social media, whether discussing our products, services, support, pricing, packaging, or even our community outreach efforts. @Dell has over 290K Twitter followers, 6.7 million Facebook likes, 685K LinkedIn followers, 371K Google+ followers, and many more audience-specific accounts with loyal followings. With the goal of reducing barriers and responding times to increase resolutions, Dell’s social strategy proactively unearths issues before they arise, and turns ranters into ravers. Dell also has several proprietary social initiatives, like the #DellLove Thank You Program, a unique platform where Dell’s customer service team members thank our customers for spreading the word about Dell and its products. These personally-addressed messages to random Dell brand loyalists surprise most, but let them know that we’re always listening, and have the power to brighten our customers’ day. The #DellLove team has posted over 450 individual videos as of December 2013. Please see an example of how we share the #DellLove below!
Dell SNA: http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2013/08/29/turning-data-into-insights-with-sna.aspx Twitter: https://twitter.com/Dell @DellCares: https://twitter.com/DellCares @DellCaresPRO: https://twitter.com/DellCaresPRO Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DellHomeUS?fref=ts LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/dell?trk=li_slideshare_1213_bestof_lcp Google+: https://plus.google.com/+Dell/posts #DellLove: http://www.youtube.com/delllounge
