Could it be that Dell's customer nightmare was even worse than previously thought? The company offered Jeff Jarvis a look behind the scenes. Jarvis is a blogger who set off the 'Dell sucks' movement last year when he shared his hellish experience in getting a properly working notebook computer. The visit culminated in a story for Business Week.

Internal Dell data, the company confessed, indicated that customer satisfaction scores plummeted to 58 in 2006 – on a 1 to 100 scale. This year it jumped back to 80 with high end customers and 74 with core consumers.

External research had shown a less dramatic drop to 74 this year, down from last year's 78. Even though that is still the lowest for the PC industry.

19 Oct 2007

These scores are hard to compare, but Yahoo for instance scores 79 and Google's stands at 78.

A low score does indicate that few people will return to a certain vendor, spelling doom for future revenues. The reason why Dell fell so deep will make for some of the most obvious case studies in business schools.

Dell pushed its customer service outsourcing partners to keep conversations as brief as possible. As a result, clients would be transferred on a constant basis, just to make the metrics look good. As Jarvis experienced, this strategy failed solve any real problems. It was all Dell's flawed metrics, not about the customer.