Last week, Lionel blogged about my interview with Service Untitled. I wanted to take a few minutes to provide an update on our blog and IdeaStorm as well.
As a global company, we continue to make investments in facilities, technology, and employees in the United States and around the world, so that we can be closer to our customers. As we grow our business, we will continue to expand our global contact center network with new locations to offer a broad range of technical support and other services to our customers.
Currently, Dell has eight contact centers in the U.S. and Canada and more than 20 contact centers outside of North America, such as Panama, El Salvador, Germany, France, Scotland, India, Philippines and China.
We’ve recently done some things to improve our service and support, and we hope you are starting to see the difference. To take things further, we’re seeking your help in IdeaStorm. In the Lighting Rod section, we’re asking you to vote and provide comments on three different ideas that came from your feedback on how we can improve our levels of customer support. You can find even more background in the Ideas in Action section as well.
In terms of things we’ve already done: we’ll continue to add more technical support team members in North America—by mid-year, we expect to have about 2,000 consumer support agents there. We have added new online tools, like the Dell Support Center, and DellConnect, our online remote resolution tool announced last year. We’ve trained our agents to fix a broader set of problems, and we reduced the number of phone queues by 38 percent, making it less likely to end up in the wrong place.
The early results are promising. We’ve seen a 62 percent decrease in our tech support transfers in the past year, and our customer satisfaction rate for tech support continues to improve where we’ve implemented these changes.
That said, we know you will tell us how we can continue to improve customer service. We look forward to seeing how you vote.