Dell CEO: Direct Model Is Religion - ' Consumer and Enterprise Markets ' (
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TechConnect is for both the enterprise and consumer?
It can be, but primarily its for the transactional business, which is the consumer and small business. Most corporations have their own version of what they would do to the overall network management, but it can be for corporate, too. Today its primarily for the consumer and small home office and small business.
How does it work?
Fundamentally, the customer—and were not through piloting it, because were developing new versions—but a customer would say, "Ive got a problem" on the phone, and the [Dell technical support] person would say, "Do we have the proper software loaded on the customers system?" and then get their approval to initiate a TechConnect session.
The person than says, "Fine," and the technician launches the program over the Internet and then takes control of the PC, and every step of the way asks for customer approval.
"Were going to do this," "It looks like youve got spyware," "It looks like youve got this problem."
Well diagnose if its a hardware problem, were going to dispatch a technician to fix your hard drive, whatever the problem might be. But they can do this for the customer while the customer is watching, and giving approvals on every step.
Therefore, you can do that remotely for a better customer experience, better experience for our techs—because now they can just take care of a problem rather than running through the customer to take care of the problem.
"Whats on your screen now? What do you see now?" They dont have to do that, they can just fix it, and its much, much lower cost. So customer satisfaction goes up. And you say, "cant a lot of people do that?" Well, yeah, they could, but when you have an indirect business model, thats not the way you want to solve a lot of those problems. We see it as a win-win-win.
You have some industry analysts calling on Dell to expand how you do business into the channel. Is there any interest at Dell now to look into this?
No, absolutely not. The direct thing is a religion. Thats what we do, thats the basis. We have a better cost structure than any of our competitors, we can offer better customer support, so no. Well experiment with things from time to time, but the core of the model is going to be direct.
When you say experiment, do you mean what youve done in the past with Costco, Target and QVC?
Well do those occasionally. Those are more sell-through items, but no, our issue is to work with the customer and know what they want and to keep that intimate relationship with them and not have a middleman step between us and them. And we dont have to, frankly. The growth opportunities for us are still pretty massive.
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