Dell and Business Ethics
I post this not because I am a staunch Apple Computer supporter, but because a very important question is raised…
Chris MacDonald, from the Business Ethics Blog, posts about Dell’s customer service and asks the following question:
“What relationship is there between Dell’s overall commitment… to ethics, on one hand, and the quality of their customer service, on the other?”
TAGS: This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Business Ethics, Business Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 23rd, 2006 at 4:33 pm
Peter, all I have to say is that Dell has terrible computers. They are not reliable and to make you happy, they just give you some more money back, that’s how they keep their so called customer service scores high. All they do is give you money back when you complain instead of fixing the actual problem. I’m not much of an Apple person (I do have an iPod) but I’m sure not a Dell person.
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:58 pm
Down here, you can’t even hear them. It’s all outsourced to Malaysia and the phone lines are terrible. Still, I have had very good performance from my Dell laptop, though I am annoyed I simply can’t walk in to a shop and get things added on or fixed. Instead, it has to be shipped to Malaysia—and I’m not willing to go to that trouble. I tried to buy a bunch of them for staff and no one ever got back to me. So customer service is lacking.
¶ As to its ethics, it’s a surprise to me that it has won awards, but the end-of-life policies it has in place sound good. However, I never knew about this, and Dell doesn’t really champion it on its web site. Makes me wonder if it is a divided company, with one office doing one thing, and its frontline people doing quite the other. In short, it may be ethically run—but poorly structured without a marketing orientation.
March 25th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
That’s a very interesting thought to consider — I imagine a number of companies have that fault.
In a semi-related vein, I’m beginning to question the ethics of any corporation (flashy ethics policy championed on its website or not) that derives a large chunk of its profits from the advantages it reaps through cheap labor and other realities of outsourcing.
To be honest, I finished Thomas Friedman’s relatively pro-globalization (and highly US-centric) The World is Flat last night and immediately shifted over to the book that has been teasing me for weeks, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. To say that my head is in a tailspin is a bit of an understatement. I’ve been going back and forth between taking care of my son and reading the book all afternoon and am determined to finish it before I head to bed. If either of you have yet to read it (directed at Paul and Jack specifically, but I’d recommend the same to anyone) I’d highly recommend it. Some of the passages are so surprising that I am finding that I continually question their legitimacy. The book is heavily footnoted, though, and I understand that a lot of fact-checking has taken place since it was originally published.
Enough yammering from me about the book…time for me to go finish it off!