Anyone who knows me has heard me rant about Dell’s horrible customer service, limited product and useless website. We have been actively moving away from Dell for over a year now but due to them finally fixing our last issue, I am investigating buying from them again. They have two huge advantages in my world:
- Ivan (he even showed me their new site – finally)
- Relationship with Dell
Ivan has been a huge attribute to many of us in this community since he joined us but I recently sat down with people who sign cheques to reinvestigate this potential move to Dell to work on our relationship with them.
I started by briefly reviewing the Dell website as it now makes it possible to find hardware without a rep (I know some of you love yours but I haven’t had a good one since 2002). Then I proceed to the best tool on earth and demonstrate the benefits of using Dell in the Spiceworks inventory. Warranty, purchase price, purchase date, available RAM slots and so much more is just a mouse-click away because of the relationship that Dell has with Spiceworks. This meeting was all wrapped up.
This is where I hit the community for what I thought would be the icing on the cake. Instead, it was the beginning of a train wreck.
Not being a huge fan of Dell maybe I haven’t paid as much attention as I should have (please correct me if I am off here) but where the heck did Dell go? First we hit the Dell Group and I was not too surprised by what I saw... conversations everywhere and lots of good info... but it seemed a little watered down.
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I tried to find a promotion which I used to always see but could not find anything (do they still have them)? As we were talking, I realized that it had been forever since I saw an ad for Dell in the community. How do they expect to sell us servers, printers, switches, firewalls, etc. without advertising? When they bought SonicWall I thought that the banner ads were going to everywhere. Are SonicWall products not as solid as they used to be? Has Dell lost faith in the purchase? Then I lost all credibility when I attempted to show them the Dell vendor page... “this is a one-stop shop for all things Dell... where we can get educated by Dell about new products...” and then the page loads and there is a “discuss” and a “twitter” tab. I said that they must be doing maintenance and showed them the CDW page (where tabs include Discuss, Welcome, Solutions, Deals, Customer Care, Reviews, Barkley and Twitter)
EDIT: just saw my first Dell ad in a long time for a Vostro mini tower... maybe I just missed them all and I saw a sonicwall ad though it was from CDW
Since I last looked at Dell, we in the Spiceworks community seem to have lost some or all of the functional benefits from their advertising, promotions, vendor pages and RFQ participation.
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Someone please tell me what the heck is going on. Has Spiceworks asked for (insert some insane dollar figure here) to keep them in the community or have they simply lost faith in our ability to create business?
I do not know how many active users are in the community but if Dell in fact leaves there is no question in my mind that I will not be going back to them. I would rather continue harassing ASUS until they take the place that Dell used to have as a “friend of spice heads”. It is one thing to support a vendor who has never heard of Spiceworks (cdw.ca maybe) but another animal completely to support a vendor that was an investor in all of us and saw no benefit.
My question to this community (if I am even right about Dell bailing on us)... how much of Dell’s exodus is our fault? How many of us told our Dell rep and his/her boss how nice it was to hear about a new printer online, see new services being advertised, get informed in the community blog, solve a problem on their vendor page or even just find warranty or driver info on our dashboard? If we do not tell them, they do not know how much we value their involvement and they never realize how much their Spiceworks relationship meant to us or to them (in dollars and relations). After Ivan stops logging in and helping us out, what’s next? We say good-bye to Katie and Priscilla?
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I saw Michael Dell speak over a decade ago and his whole talk was about the online world belonging to the people who could build communities online. Apparently Dell gave up but we are part of the greatest online community I have ever seen and I for one am proud of what we do. We need to stop this online derailment now. What could we do as a community to prove our worth to vendors?