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David Miketinac As always we encourage all of you to reach out if there is anything that I can ever do. I alsowant to introduce Phil Bryant, good morning. Phil also one of the executives here at Dell. Alittle bit of background and then I’ll let Phil give a little bit background on himself. I’m aseventeen-year Dell veteran. By the way, I currently live in Canada, I work here in Toronto. I’ve been traveling over the last six months all over your beautiful country and consider myself ina lot of ways Canadian. Little known fact, I have a great grandfather that was a Canadianlumberjack, so my connection to Canada actually is also my bloodline. I’m really excited to behere and to introduce Phil Bryant.

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Phil Bryant I’m Phil Bryant, I’m the vice presidential manager for our retail business across North America,also responsible for Canada. I’ve been with Dell about twelve years, prior to that I worked forAT&T. In those twelve years I spent eight of that twelve years outside of Austin. I lived in Asiafor six years and Europe for two years in various part of Dell business. I’ve been back in NorthAmerica since about last, well about this time last year, I came back almost this week last year.So it’s good to be back on this side of the world. I appreciate you guys taking the time to comein and talk, talk to us this morning. You know we’ve done these things in three other countries, Iguess it started in Germany I guess is where we did the first one and then the US and China, andCanada is the fourth one of these that we’ve done. So I really appreciate you taking the time tocome in and speak with us.

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David Miketinac I currently run the small and medium business organization in Canada, which also hasresponsibility for the channel and previous to this position I spent three years building upchannel in the US. Dell has been a company for 27 years. 27 years ago Michael Dell, in hisdorm room in the University of Texas, had an idea how to go and market and put technology outthere differently than it had been put out before. At the time it was just the PC and in 27 years alot of changes happen and I think all of you in the room understand more than most that we’re atan inflection point for technology overall. But the foundation of what Michael formed thecompany 27 years ago and where we are right now, the principles of what we do are exactly thesame. And part of those principles, actually are the reason why all of you are here today. Thevoice of the customer is critical to what we do at Dell. And I will tell you in my 17 years,traveling all around the globe, US, Canada, is that one of the things that I think makes Dellunique are forums just like this. So today we’re going to talk a lot about a lot of things. What Iwould ask from each of you is to tell us the things that Dell does really well. I think because itputs a nice stamp on the hard work that goes into every day and the things that are thecornerstones of our business. But I think what is much more helpful if you could tell us aboutthe things that we don’t do well in your experience. Because there is an old adage that the onlyway that human beings really learn is through mistakes, and I can tell you that having come froma business where building a channel at Dell was something a lot of people didn’t believe wecould really do. I think that a lot of people in the room could say that Dell hasn’t beenincredibly successful in the channel yet. There may be others that may say that Dell is seeing alot of success in the channel. I think the reason why is because we want to know what we aredoing right and wrong. Three years ago, I went to the first ever channel session with Dell wherewe were one of the sponsors. When my boss Greg Davis got up to speak, about half of the roomgot up and left. When we went to the breakout sessions and I was there, doing my presentationand my brown bag, half of the people got up and left and the ones that stayed talked about howDell was not really committed to the channel. Fast forward 2 ½ years my last channel eventwhen I was in Boston, Dell won the lion’s share of awards and the gentleman that was from oneof the other sponsors said, “the big gorilla in the room is sitting over there at table four, when itcomes to the channel and small media business. The small and medium business was actuallysitting at table 4.” There’s a lot more we can learn, but we can’t learn without your feedback.So my own request today is- let us happen. Give us what we are not doing, because onlythrough Dell’s failures can we actually learn how to succeed. I know all of your time isincredibly important to you, and I will thank all of you up front for this investment, because that’s what it really is. It’s an investment. You will help Dell deliver that technology that helpscustomers and partners grow and thrive. I thank you in advance for your contributions today andwould invite you to tell us what we could do better. Thank you.

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Mark Evans So, my name is Mark Evans and I’m the moderator for today’s event. My role is to learn, whichis a really experience for me, because I haven’t been involved in this kind of format before. I’minterested in learning about the Dell approach and some of the new products, the 14Z laptoplooks pretty sexy, so I’m going to take that for a spin later on today. My role for today is tomoderate the conversations, get everybody involved and to make everyone feel comfortable andto get as much value out of the day as possible. A few housekeeping notes before we get started.One is, you all received a copy of the guidelines, and essentially if you boil it down, you have tobe transparent and clear with the fact that you have been invited by Dell to be a guest. This is avery sort of open and transparent form and so page one- complete disclosure and terms of yourparticipation and at the same time they are very happy you have actually traveled and made theinvestment to come here today, some people as far as Vancouver and Winnipeg and some peoplefrom Windsor and local people as well. As it’s mentioned this will be very open and honest andfrank discussion. You know, I often find that some of the things that don’t help the most iswhen people tell you how great you are and how wonderful you do and everything’s great,because you don’t learn anything. As much as Dell wasn’t to hear nice things about them, itsalso important to hear things that people don’t like, because that’s the way that the organizationwill move forward and integrate improvements to their products and the way they operate.Everything is on the record. So, if you want to blog or tweet about what you hear today, pleasefeel free to do that and it’s been live streamed as well, so you can wave to the camera, just to theback, we’re live. We're having a little bit of technical difficulty right now with the Wi-Fi, butwe’ll be up soon, they can join in in fifteen or twenty minutes. If you’re going to tweet or putthis thing on Facebook the hashtag is #dellcapcanada. You might want to warn your followersthat you will be tweeting a flurry of Dell focused tweets today, we hope you’ll be tweeting abouta lot of things Dell today. One of the things that I want to make people aware is the fact thatthere are a lot of Dell executives in the room and if you want one on one interviews with any ofthem, they are happy to do so, so there will be a series of breaks throughout the day so you cancorral anybody here and pull them aside. If you do interview, just a pen and paper interview,however you want to do that. You will also notice that there are a number of Dell people in theroom as well. Some of them are participating and some of them are simply taking notes andlearning and feel free to introduce yourselves and engage in conversation about what they aredoing and more important what you are doing as well, because I think they want to learn moreabout the people in the room. At this point I think I want to ask some of the Dell customers andsome of the Dell people in the room to introduce themselves, perhaps tell people where they arefrom, what they hope to get out of the day and when you do do that, please give people yourTwitter user name so if people want to follow you or just want to comment on Twitter they cando so…who wants to be the first volunteer?

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Brad Penner Hi, I’m Brad Penner, and I manage the consumer call centres that we have in our Canadianconsumer business, our English and our French teams, and I am located actually in our nationaloffice and have been in this role for three years, but I grew up in the southern Canadian provinceof Minnesota <laughs> I am well versed in this weather. I love my job in Canada, I lovecoming up here. It’s a great country, a great city. I’m just really excited to be a part of this andI’ve never been involved in an event like this before and I’m really interested in hearing aboutyour experiences with our sales teams, about being a consumer and what we can do to improve.

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Tara Lemieux Hi, I’m Tara. I manage consumer marketing communications. I’m really excited to be here. I’ve been at Dell for about 10 years now. On the small medium business side as well as theconsumer side. I am just very excited to hear feedback on both sides of the fence and if anyonewants to chat during the break, please come find me. I’d love to hear personal from you, lookingforward to it.

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David Bohl I’m David Bohl, and I’m from the online support website and I guess I’m really excited tounderstand what we can do better to provide you kind of those tools that make you successful introuble shooting your issue as quickly as possible, that’s really what I focus on. A lot ofcomment on what we do right and what we do wrong, for me whenever we do something wrongits best to contrast that with who did it right for you, what’s a similar experience you had. I’ll beon one of the panels later and I hope that can be a part of our conversation

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Suzanne Akleh Hi, I’m Suzanne and I’m with DFS Canada Dell, leasing and financing. I support all businesssegments, large corporate as well as small medium business and consumer. And I’m veryexcited to here today as well, and I want to hear what we do well and what we don’t do well andjust like David said, I want to hear who is doing it better so I can help and what Tara said, Iwould love to talk in the break.

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Sarah Richardson Hi, I’m Sarah, @sarahatdell on Twitter and I help manage the CAP Days program, so I got to bea part of the very first event over two years ago. I get to help plan these great events but alsothink beyond that. How can we continue our relationships with you guys and our customers inother countries and I’m really interested to hear about how you want us to continue therelationship that we are starting to build today with you guys, ongoing via social, keeping you upto date with what we are doing with all our great products and really figure out how we cancustomize that relationship with you and not only you and your extended social communities. I’m excited to be a part of today.

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Maurice McFarlane Hello, and good morning everybody, my name is Maurice McFarlane, I am the enterprise brandmanager for Canada, so servers, storage, and networking products, data center, roll up to me andI helped set up the product showcase today. I’ve been at Dell for 8 years in sales and now I’m inmarketing. When I was in sales I was in close touch with the costumers and now I’m inmarketing. I’d love to hear any sort of feedback that comes out today and thank you.

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Janet Fabri I’m Janet Fabri. I handle corporate communications for all aspects in business in Canada. Iwant to thank all of you for being with us today. I can say without exception when invitationswere extended that you responded very quickly, very positively, no matter what your point ofview was coming into this. We’re here to listen, we’re here to learn and thank you so much forbeing with us.

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Anne Camden Hi, I’m Anne Camden, 13-year veteran at Dell, and I’m one of your panelists later today. I’ll betalking to you about product development. My particular area of expertise is more consumerdesktops and laptops. I know a little bit about the small business products, enterprise, all him<laughs> and they’re my babies, okay? So, just like any parent wants to hear what their child isdoing great and what their child can do better, that’s what I want to hear today, it's helping helpmy children be better global citizens, okay? Thank you.

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David Gair Hi, good morning everyone, thanks for joining us here, my name is David Gair. I manage smallmedia business marketing for Dell Canada. I’ve been with Dell for 12 years now. In marketingwe tend to paint this glorious picture, of what we aspire to in terms of our solutions in productsand it’s very important to see how we deliver against this, right? So, is our marketing matchingthe real experience, so that’s what we want to hear from you, as well our online experience sothe purchase experience, the research is useful, what can we improve, so just curious where wecan improve things, so thanks for joining us.

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Mike Agerbo My name is Mike Agerbo. I’m from Vancouver. I own a production agency out there calledBlink Media, we do a lot of online video content work for a lot of big tech companies. I’m alsoa tech journalist; I produce a couple television shows here in Canada for the Business NewsNetwork and other broadcasters including TV shows called Get Connected and App TV as well.I’m excited to see what happens here because not only do I cover a lot of Dell stuff in myjournalist hat, but we’re also a big Dell costumer at the agency as well.

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Nancy Polance My name is Nancy, I’m from Windsor, and my Twitter handle is @whispersinspire. I’m moreso of a life style blogger and I’m here just to give my opinion and I have a lot of questions fromDell customers and people who have had experiences with Dell. I write for some onlinepublications and manage an online community as well. I’m here and I’m excited to hear whateveryone has to say. Thank you.

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Dick Weytze Hi, my name is Dick Weytze, until earlier this year I was with the Federal Government,providing service and support for users in one department within the government. I aminterested really in just seeing what is coming along with Dell, I’ve been a very strong user, afterthree years with the company originally, I finally standardized on computers and it ended upbeing Dell, I’ve always been happy with them and I just wanted to see where they are going andyou know, from now on.

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Shirley Freinkel I’m Shirley Freinkel and I am a software quality analyst. I’ve used Dell computers quite a lot inthe last couple years, my family uses them at home, and I’ve just like to get out to hear about thenew Dell technology.

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Jason Duty Good morning everyone, I’m Jason Duty and my Twitter handle is @JasonDatDell but a moreimportant Twitter handle for you to know is @dellcares. So I, along with David supportorganization but I should run our social media customer support business for Dell. So you’re onTwitter and you need help or you have friends and family that do, please let us know @dellcaresand we’re glad to help. I would say also that like many of the other Dell participants, first thankyou all for coming and being willing to share your feedback. Our ears will be open today andwhile David and I came to share what we’re doing in support and some changes that are beingmade, I think we are more interested in your feedback about what’s working and what’s not.Thanks again in advance for sharing that with us. This is my third CAP Days and I’m reallyexcited to be here with you all and the couple of sessions I’ve attended so far have been reallybeneficial for me and I’ll share with you the first session we had in the US, we recently broughtthat team back together over this last summer and it was really exciting to bring them back inand be able to share with them some of the changes we had made based on the feedback and soplease know that we treat these sessions very seriously and the feedback you give us we’ll takeback in and see what changes we are going to make.

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Dave Perry Thank you for having us, my name is Dave Perry, @socialdave is my Twitter handle. I haveactually use a lot of your competitor’s products over the years, I used to be with IBM for aboutfive years, actually worked in Toronto. I’m now business director at a game developer inMontreal. We have been using your products for quite some time. I’ve only had a chance towork with Dell products for about three months now. I have a gaming blog, so I’m veryinterested in what you’re doing in the social media sphere how you’ve made that successful andhow your seen and performing as a leader in that, and also a bit of a geek gamer, so you know,looked interested in all of your new products. Thanks.

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Lior Hershkovitz Good morning, my name is Lior Hershkovitz I guess so far I’m representing the financialservices sector. I’ve been a Dell costumer since the mid 90’s. I basically bought three differentDell systems in the last year and a half, both for work and personal use. Overall I’m just here toshare my experiences. I’m honored to be invited. I also run web blog, a website called MortgageEconomics, I’m just here to share my views so.

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Mark Graham Good morning everyone my name is Mark Graham and twenty years ago almost to the day Ibought my first Dell computer, I was heading off to Queens University as an 18 year old andDell had a great offering and I was just reflecting on that it’s been twenty years. Which one wasit? Do you remember what it was? It was HUGE. <laughs> I think it cost me 3 grand in twentyyear ago dollars and it lasted me until about my third or fourth year in university so it was a realworkhorse. I have since moved on and become an entrepreneur, I own two businesses, one ofwhich is called RightSleeve which is a promotional products company that is very interested inhow technology has been able to allow us to stand out within a pretty traditional and matureindustry and we have also started social software company called Common Sku, which is asocial CRM platform for our industry, heavily involved and interested in cloud computing, howcomputers can really make workers day to days much more efficient and social and moreinteresting, and we were honored two years ago to be the Canadian recipient of the Dell SMBExcellence award, it was really neat I had a chance to go down and visit Michael Dell and toldhim that story and his computers were huge and he said, you know in China they like their boxesbig, that’s what he said <laughs> That was interesting. Thanks very much for having me heretoday.

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Stuart R. Crawford Good morning everybody, my name is Stuart Crawford and I represent the channel. I work withchannel partners across the globe, Canada, the US, Australia, the UK; we have clients all overthe place. I ran an IT bar in Calgary Alberta for fifteen years, recently moved back to Toronto,missing my Leaf games on a regular occasion <laughs> I’m a big Leaf fan. We were a Dellpartner long before an official program came up and I like to think we helped Dell get sometraction when everyone beat them up, we’d wave the Dell flag and fly it very high. Thus wehave a very strong relationship with, even today, with some of the channel people here inCanada. In my role today, I help IT bars and resellers go to market and how to position theirbusinesses for success, so one of the parts is helping with building strong vendor relationships,so that’s why I’m here today to bring the voice of the channel to today’s event.

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Jody Arsenault Hi, I’m Jody my Twitter handle is @mommymomentblog, I am an online magazine for momsbasically and a social media lover so I’m here to bring my readers and audience and theirquestions to you and to hear what you have to say to them. Thanks for having me.

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Kathryn Lavallee I’m Kathryn Lavallee. I’m actually from Saskatchewan so this is quite the big trip for me<laughs>…and along with Nancy and Jody, I represent the mommy blogger contingency hereand I’m really excited to hear about Dell’s technology, to share some ideas and especially tokind of see from the customer point of view that easy user, that type thing what Dell is doing tomake the experience enjoyable so, thanks so much.

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Eric Vallillee Hi I’m Eric, my Twitter name is just Eric Vallillee I’m a student and earlier this year I startedmy own internet marketing company that’s already sort of grown to the point that where I didthe website for Sheila Copps last month, who is running for the liberal presidency for Canada.So I’m doing quite well that way, but I’m here because I have some concerns about some of theproducts but I really like Dell, Dell was the first…from, shortly after that I tried Apple and withthe exception of my phone, came right back to Dell a few months later, so I’m just excited tosort of share my views and learn more about Dell’s products.

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Joe Mallon Hi, I’m Joe Mallon. I’m a native of Toronto actually, and I was very glad to be invited today. I’m a long time costumer to Dell going back to the late 90’s and yes they were big boxes backthen <laughs> I apologize for the weather especially to those who came from southern climates.I’m also a long time Dell community forum member. I’m looking forward to seeing theproducts and giving some feedback and thank you.

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Bob Benedetti Hi, I’m Bob Benedetti. I’m the former TV broadcaster and executive producer. I’ve been both aDell consumer, personally I preferred Dell over the years and in 1995, I started a weeklytechnology report of gadgets on CTV Montreal, and it was kind of new and in those days I hadto fight for every second with management who thought people didn’t care about technology,but it was fun to start that, and I did that up until two years after I retired and I became mayor ofthe community where I live in Quebec, stopped doing it for a while and then when the mayorthing went away I thought what the heck try again so I started a blog called home technologyMontreal, my Twitter handle is @hometechmtl and I’m loving what I’m doing. I publish everysingle day and it is a gamut of opinion to product reviews and just sometimes just funny littlemovies I pick up and stuff like that, it’s a crazy little blog so if you want to drop by sometimetake a look at it it’s hometechntl.com. Eric and I happen to have a link, it’s funny in these roomsyou’re always looking for a link. I worked many years ago with Janet. One of the comments Igot from the followers on my blog when I asked for comments on Dell came from one of hisclients, Julie. So you go somewhere, there’s always a link. I’m looking forward to this day; Ihope to hear some answers to some of the questions that people raised to me when I asked forcomments. I’ll also pass you on the good things they said. Whenever I hear, if I havesuggestions I will feel free to offer them and I hope that even if one of my thoughts turns upsomeday down the road in helping Dell make a better product, I’d be happy.

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Melissa Lee Hi, I’m Melissa Lee, and I work for Cohn and Wolfe, the PR agency representing Dell Canada,so I’m here to listen to what you all have to say and I look forward to it. I’m also a Dellconsumer on my personal time and my Twitter handle is @missy_lady. So I hope to be chattingwith you in the future.

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Fiona Cassidy I’m Fiona Cassidy, I’m with Cohn and Wolfe and working with Janet, and we’re here to help outtoday, if you have any questions, or need help with taxis and that sort of thing, then we can help.We also want to just steer you in the direction of the video booth which is there to record anycomments that you have, what your opinion is of Dell coming in, and at the end of the session,what might have changed, what you got out of the day. So if you don’t have a chance toparticipate in the group, feel free to go to the video booth over there.

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Hanif Thakor Morning everyone, my name is Hanif I am the laptop brand manager. I’ve been with Dell forabout four years now, up to this point I am acting with the small medium business division, so I’m very well versed with the latitude, precision, vostro laptops. Recently I went to the consumerdivision so I’m looking forward to getting your feedback on all of our laptops assortments, XPS,Inspiron and the assortment of our laptops here. Have a chance to look around, touch them, feelthem, can’t wait to hear about them from you guys. Thank you.

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Bill Tyrrell Bill Tyrrell, consumer direct side of the business, I’ve been at Dell for twenty years. I’ve beenin consumer, small business, corporate, public, all around the organization. Happy customersare the key to our success so we're looking forward to what you have to say.

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Selin Stancati I’m going to stand up because I’m a little on the short side. Selin Stancati. I’ve worked for Dellfour and a half years, so with the tenure around the room, I’m a newbie. I’ve spend most of mytime on the consumer side, just recently moved to small medium business, so I’m learning quitea bit. I am responsible for demand generation and media planning, so any questions. I’minterested in the bloggers, you can teach me a few things. I look forward to the feedback andchatting with you during the break. Thank you.

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Prashant Ramesh Morning everyone, my name is Prashant, I manage the consumer online business in Canada. I’ve been at Dell for over seven years, I’ve been in the e-business for over thirteen years and youknow similar to what Selin said, we get feedback every single day from our customers on dell.ca. When you hit dell.ca, I am responsible for your experience, up until you are researching, tillyou check out and after you check out, too. So the exciting thing being at being at Dell in my e-business years of experience is that we are really connected with our customers more so than anyother company I’ve worked for in the e-business space. It’s exciting, so for over seven yearsdell.ca has gone through three huge overhauls, based on customer feedback, so we’re listening,we still have a lot of work to do. I’m looking forward to hearing what you have to say,comments about your experience at dell.ca.

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Lazlo Molnar Hi everyone, my name is Lazlo. I’ve worked for Dell for about five years now. I had thepleasure of actually serving our social media program here at Dell, so on Facebook.com/dellcanada where I will be posting today and taking questions, as well as Twitter, Dellhome sales today. I’m very happy to be here and look forward to the constructive criticism.Thank you.

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Mark Evans So, a couple of final housekeeping notes before we get into the rest of this session. The videobooth is set up so that anytime throughout the day you want to make a comment, or you want todo a mini interview with a Dell executive, we want to capture your thoughts and yourperceptions of the day, what you think of the day think what you got out of the day. I think thata lot of people have expectations and hopefully some of them will be met and maybe you’ll bedelighted in many other ways in what you get out of the day. And finally, as you’ve noticed we’ve got a graphic artist, Lisa and Diisa, who will be recording graphically all the conversationsand themes today. Feel free to take pictures of her artwork and we’ll also be sending out a highres image of the final product so that you can maybe post it on blogs. I saw some of the previousartwork, some other CAP Days they really are spectacular and I think one of the things I amgoing to take away, is that I run a conference called Mesh and I really like this idea, you shouldgive me your business cards. I think it’s a truly terrific way of sort of capturing what’s going ontoday, so thank you for that.

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Phil Bryant Yeah, I think just before we get into the main part of the agenda, the whole thing is designed tobe a conversation so I think we promised no power point or anything like that for the whole day.We’ve got people here from as you saw multiple disciplines within Dell. We’ll conduct a seriesof forums as we go through the day and we’ll focus in on things like the sales process with Brad,tech support and customer care process, social media, blogging, product, all of the differentdisciplines and give you a chance to go through that and talk with the people who have big partsin those organizations here and run and manage the Canada business. So again we appreciate it,in the feedback here is what’s important and having a conversation is important and one of thegreat things about my job and you’ll probably see my pacing because I’m usually not sitting in achair this much during the day, I’m usually out talking to customers, what I love is that I neverhave a conversation with a customer that I’m not surprised, no matter how well prepared I am,no matter how much I think I know the customer’s business, the customer really understandstheir business a lot better than I do. These conversations are the most meaningful. A coupleyears ago I went to Istanbul to meet with a large customer. I worked with the account team, Ithought I knew everything we had done right and wrong with that account. I had gotten somefantastic feedback and we started going through some things and this customer was naming allthese things that we had was in conversation in 2009, was naming all of these things that wehave done wrong and I’m looking at the account team, I thought we had addressed every issue inDell with every problem. And so I finally just asked the customer, “when did this happen” andhe said 1991. It had been almost twenty years, right? That this customer had been dealing withDell and customers have very long memories. When you do things right, it leaves a lastingimpression and naturally your brand with a customer. So again, it’s all about getting thefeedback and making sure we respond to it and deal with the issues we have. It’s like whatWinston Churchill said- I need the feedback I just don’t always like hearing it. <laughs> Sothat’s what this is about here during the day, please speak up , speak freely and it should be agreat day.

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Mark Evans Before we get into the sessions one of the things may be you could give me some color on andthe people in the room, is just sort of the reason Dell is doing CAP Days, and maybe some of thethings that have come out of previous cap days because I think a lot of people are looking to seehow their important and how their thoughts are going to be integrated in your going forward.

1 2Phil Bryant Again, CAP Days are a part of the ongoing dialogue we have with customers. Folks like Jason

and others, how many conversations you guys have every day, Jason, with customers?1

1 2 Jason Duty For my team, we do a couple thousand a week.1

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Phil Bryant Same thing for Brad on the sales side. You know at Dell we have always had a great legacy oflistening which is one of the keys, and one of the great things about the direct relationship, isbeing able to get all of that feedback and then go and act on that feedback whether it is inproduct design, whether its improving how we service and support, whether its improving andhow we treat our marketing, those kinds of things, we are constantly trying to sense what’s goingon and make the changes in response to that.

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Mark Evans How do you pick the people in the room? There are some Dell fans, Mac users, and lots ofiPhones. It’s interesting mix of people both geographically and in terms of the computers theyuse.

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Phil Bryant You don’t learn much if all you do is talk to people who like you a lot. Again, I love the praise,right, I love it when I call home and my wife says, “oh gee, Phil, you’re doing a great job.”<laughs> It’s just not always the most effective thing around the house, when all I want to hearis the praise and not the other things. Again, it’s a complicated environment right now. David,you talked about the changes in the industry in the 27 years, what about the changes in theindustry in the last 27 months? We’ve had entire categories come and go in the last 27 months,so if you’re not constantly getting feedback and listening and trying to respond to that, you kindof miss the game. You miss on whole waves and trends in the industry.

1 2Mark Evans So at the end of the day, when we are all having cocktails and I come up to you and say how’d

you define success today?1

1 2Phil Bryant I just want to learn, I’d just want to hear more, I want to learn about things that we can do to go

out and improve the business.

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Mark Evans So, we’ve got an agenda but it’s completely flexible, so if the conversations going really great,we’ll keep on talking. We’re not going to have to adhere to the timelines hard and fast. I thinkit sounds like we are ready to move to the next presentation.

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David Miketinac Hey Mark, I want to make sure I touch on a couple things. We talked about why we are askingquestions, why we are doing this. The one thing that 17 years being at the same company offersyou, it offers you at least a perspective. I think Phil probably could comment and all of the Dellfolks could comment in the room, our history and where we’ve gone and what we’ve done I’lljust bring up couple of things, today. If you take a look at mechanisms in which Dell getsfeedback, this is a very big one. This is not the only one. There are surveys that go out at everytime we purchase, there’s surveys that are called net promoter that we do almost monthly inmost of the businesses. There’s one called Tell Dell where our employees tell us what we coulddo differently. There are internal blogs that we have. You know, one of the things I think ourcompany is good at, clearly always could get better, we want data. We want to know. I thinkPhil will tell you having come from AT&T, and a lot of the folks in the room, Dell is a very datadriven company. We want to know how we can be better. I think our presence in thecommunity, our presence in the communities that we live, presence around the world- I thinkthere’s this insatiable thirst for how could we be better. Michael wrote a book several years ago,direct to Dell and a few years ago Michael came out and said, the direct model is a businessstrategy, it’s not a religion and it was very empowering as a guy who was going in the channel tothink about how we could meet the needs of our customers and different mechanisms, where theCEO of our company came out and said, we’re evolving. We change. We do things differently.Part of that difference is having open ears; think someone said that, our ears are open. I couldgive you a number of different examples of things that we do to listen. What I would say is mylitmus test for if this session is successful or not is how long is the list of things we have to gofix. If it’s a short list I don’t know how successful we will be. If it’s a lengthy list, an actionablelist, to me it will be a success. Because Phil will also tell you, every time you go and do ameeting with any Dell executive, the action list is always pretty substantial, it’s because of thisinsatiable thirst to be better, and a willingness to listen. This forum is about listening.

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Mark Evans Alright, we are going to talk about customer support. Jason Duty and David Bohl are going tolead the presentation and I think given the fact that a key part of Dell’s approach to business iscustomer support, they have been formed on dell.com since 1996, a very engaged customersupport team and obviously enthusiastic embrace of social media as a way to support customers.This is really part of the company’s DNA. I think as much as they do great jobs, they really dowant to hear real life experiences and get your insights. Feel free to raise your hand or to speakup about things that you like, things that you don’t like, and the team will give you their inputand where they are going and what they are doing.

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Jason Duty Great, and to follow onto what David was saying, I think that our culture at Dell is definitelybeing pleased but never satisfied, so this is at the heart of these sessions as well as to figure outhow we could please you all <laughs> and figure out how we are never going to be satisfied. SoI think David and I brought a few things to share with you today in terms of big improvementprograms in the customer support space and by customer support I mean those things wetraditionally talk about being technical support or customer service, I’m ready to share some ofthose things with you and then as I mention I’m really responsible for customer support in socialmedia so I’m like to share a few things that the team is doing there, and tell you a little bit aboutmy organization. I think David is going to do the same for e-support, the Dellsupport.comwebsite, I’ll say we’re going to keep our words pretty short because again we are more interestedin your feedback and what you have to say.

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I think in general across the customer support business there are a few big programs that we’rereally counting on to drive change within the business and provide a better customer experienceand frankly these programs have been developed because of feedback from folks like you. I’lllist off a few of these pretty quickly, and tell you what they’re all about, and definitely open toyour feedback about them. One of them I’ll say is a program that we call CISS- Complex IssueSimple Solution and for a while at Dell we had trouble shooting processes that weren’tnecessarily geared to the person talking to us on the phone. So someone who was a novice withcomputers and someone who was an IT professional, got treated the same way if you called intothe queues for supporting the consumer and small business. Definitely not the right model, sowith a CISS the idea there was we have these really complex issues and one of them is a bluescreen of death as an example and if you’ve ever experienced one of those and had to talk to atechnician whether at Dell or somewhere else, the steps to solve that problem can be prettyextensive, somewhat complicated and pretty darn time consuming and frustrating. We foundthat there is actually a better way to serve customers when they have that problem, and ratherthan put them through a number of hurdles, call us back a couple times to confirm somethingworked or didn’t work, we saw that despite how many actions we asked customers to take totrouble shoot, the end result was almost always the same thing. So what we’ve done is sort oferased some of those middle steps and immediately gotten to the solution, so today if you get theblue screen of death, it’s less likely we’ll be trouble shooting with you and more likely we’llsend you a hard drive with an image burned on it already, or in some cases a drive that allowsyou to restart your system and reimage it. So that’s an example of one program that’s happeningat Dell and we’re hopeful it creates a better customer experience for folks that have to call us forsupport. There’s another program that I think is very interesting, we call it the first 60 daysprogram. Through talking with customers like you and analyzing some of our call center date,we figured out that after customers buy a system, within the first sixty days they generally have aunique and fairly common set of problems that they call on us and ask questions about. So oneof them, as an example, is software that is installed on their system. Whether it be an officesoftware package or something else, we found that customers called us in the first couple ofmonths about those software applications. So we said, how can we create a better experiencearound this. What we did was create a team that specializes in the first 60 days experience and isused to dealing with questions around software or other things. So we actually service customerswith this unique support professionals that are familiar with these issues and actually help thecustomers pretty quickly. There’s a third program that we call one team, one goal, and thisprogram is designed to reduce the number of times the customer of times the customer may betransferred at Dell, whose ever called Dell and been transferred between one group and another.It’s not very fun, it’s not fun with any company. We found that there are again a set of thesecommon issues that typically got transferred around and it typically happens between thesecouple of teams, why don’t we just put these two teams together and allow them to solveeverything. So that’s a solution that we started to implement and one we expect to continuegoing forward and we’re seeing some positive results from that as well. I’ll pause there a bit toget feedback or questions or comments you have around those few programs.

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Mark Evans I think what you are looking for is real life customer experiences, for instance, the good, the bad,the indifferent, things that have gone well, things you’d like to see different. Anybody got someinsight to share?

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Eric Vallilee About six months ago my Dell laptop started really, really slowing down on me like it was justcrazy slow. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t fix it so I decided to just format out the harddrive and start fresh. The problem was that after I did that, some of the software that came withthe computer stopped working, reinstall it and reactivate it, but I didn’t have the activation keysfor it, like McAfee, that sort of thing. So I called Dell support and was transferred around acouple of times. Then I was told that I had to contact McAfee, only to be told I had to contactDell, so I called back, they gave me a different number and when I finally called back after acouple of hours, the other number was closed. So I don’t use McAfee anymore. I never got itresolved, I use Microsoft Security Essentials instead, but that was pretty disappointing to mebecause you pay extra for this for a tech support with Dell, you pay an extra $100-$200 and tohave that result, on top of the software you paid for, it’s pretty disappointing.

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1 1 Mark Evans Was their any resolution to that?1

1 1 Eric Vallillee Yeah, I changed software.1

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Jason Duty So I’m sorry you had to go through that first and foremost, frankly software issues are a bigchallenge for us and for us internally it’s sometimes simple to figure out what’s a hardwareproblem and a software problem but sometimes it’s not and so we expect for the averageconsumer it’s probably not that easy as well. That’s one of the things we continue to work on tomake that process better and to simplify those kinds of things. So I appreciate your feedback.

1 2 Mark Evans Any other thoughts, anybody else?1

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Dick Weytze Over the years I’ve been working, using Dell systems for 16 years and even before that actually Iwas working for a company where I did service warranties for them. One thing that I found withDell every time I had called the support desk, I seem to bounced all over the world, which isvery interesting. One night that I found very gratifying is possibly because the federalgovernment, I think the 1-800 number we had to call is different from SME’s, individuals,whatever. I was talking with somebody in Cape Breton and I really enjoyed speaking fromsomeone at tech support within Canada, and Cape Breton... I got a kick out of it a few times.Problems in themselves, many software problems we ended up building our own images, wehave our own set of problems most of the time we had to work them out internally so it’s hard tocompare that. The only major hardware problems I had was that the batteries never seemed tolast. We’ve gone through to the Latitude right from the models 14-15 years ago till today, theyjust do not seem to stand up compared to other manufacturers. Just wonder if that is beingworked on.

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1 2 Jason Duty So that’s a little bit outside my domain.1

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Hanif Thakor I can totally address the Latitude response. Recently we launched the Latitude e-series againstthe competition and it performs better and the battery life has improved significantly across theboard. Recently we launched the Vostro 131 which is more of a small medium business productand it's a real sleek product (it's in the back if you want to look at it). We had it internalize thebattery and through feedback from customers we made it a replaceable battery and we've alsoextended the battery life. We've taken this kind of feedback and battery life seems to be one ofthose common recurring things. Not only do you get the extended battery like you see here butyou can get a battery slice or replace your optical drive for additional battery so there are lots ofsolutions and you can run your system all day long without recharging it. The other thing is thatwhen you plug it and within an hour you have an 80% charge; our competition can't do that.

1 1Jason Duty You raised another point in your comment about offshoring support, you mentioned that

sometimes you get someone from all around the world when you talk to support people.1

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Dick Weytze It’s dependent upon time of day. I used to go to work very early and I don’t think anyone wasonline in Canada, so yeah, I’d be speaking with people from other countries and sometimes evendown in the States, that was interesting. I know people are not supposed to divulge where theyare but they gave a little bit of information, I did enjoy that. Most people were very helpful.Many were quite knowledgeable and my problems resolved quite quickly.

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Jason Duty Good. we’ve actually been working on our global support force, and so, to give a person in onecountry to call Dell support it’s likely you’ll get someone in another country and we know thatthat can be challenging and that’s constantly an area of focus for us. I’m kind of curious aboutother experiences in the room. When you call Dell support, what’s your feedback?

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Lior Hershkovitz I think from the consumer point of view, I’ve bought quite a few Dell systems over the past fewyears. It used to be very bad, especially, well I know you guys get a lot of flak because it’s aoffshore call center, a lot of people complain that they can’t understand the people they talk to. Ipersonally didn’t find that to be the issue, but in terms of them solving the problems, it’s a hugeproblem. A lot of them are completely incompetent, they will tell you just basic troubleshooting,they don’t really think outside of the box. If there is something wrong with drivers, they willjust tell you to update it from the website and if that doesn’t work, please call Windows. Well,in a perfect world unfortunately, not everyone has the time to do that. The second purchase thatI made was a Studio 9100, we discovered that there was a flap when you used the head phonejack lot of feedback probably because it’s too close to the power unit. So basically I had toescalate all the way to the demi gods of customer service, and even they could not resolve. Oneof the things I suggested, because the system was already exchanged and the second systemshowed exactly the same problems I said, you know what just extend the warranty and maybe ifyou come up with a fix it would be covered under the warranty. Now I’m basically stuck withthis system, it’s not a huge issue, but considering it’s a premium product you’d think you’d findthese kind of problems before you ship it out. The third one was just recently it was an XPSlaptop we had a problem with the screen initially and I think that the customer service on thethird one was much better. In terms of that they should be called back to check systemexchange, so they called back, they were a lot more concerned, how is the system working, didyou accept a new system. It was very smooth, I’m impressed with the last one. All thishappened in the last two years, they were complete disasters in terms of them actuallyidentifying the problem and also when it comes to thinking outside of the box a little bit. Theyare like, no, we can’t do that, no we can’t extend the warranty, but it’s your defect and so it’sonly fair. If you escalated the problem to engineering, but we don’t know when there is going tobe a fix. Thank you very much, but I was hoping to expect a lot more considering I just spent$1,600 on a brand new system. So, but I think in terms of technical support offshore issue, yesthere are sometimes a lot of needless transfers between departments especially when you need tobuy new systems and so you call tech support they say, well we have to transfer you to the othertech support, then you have to talk to them and then customer service, okay so we’ll transfer youback to customer service. I think it’s gotten better, but there’s still a lot of room forimprovement.

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1 2Jason Duty Well I’m glad to hear that your most recent one went well, one out of three isn’t very good,

right?1

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Lior Hershkovitz I was pleasantly surprised, and you know, with all the three systems, which is two laptops andone desk tops, I never actually kept the original system. The first one was an Inspiron 1545 andthe screen was defected so it had to be exchanged. The second one was the problem with thehead phone jack, which I complained, they exchanged it but the second one had the sameproblem, it was also confirmed by the technician. The third one again the screen defects, at least20 dead pixels, which is actually the upgraded screen but that one went smooth, they exchangedit and the new system does not have that problem. It erodes confidence. It’s one thing to have adefective system shipped to you, but it’s also and how you handle the exchange process, howsmoothly and how without any exacerbating the problem even more without all these transfersbetween one department and another. It has to be a lot more smooth.

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1 2 Jason Duty Thanks for your feedback. And I’m going to talk to you after, when we get a break, as well.

1 1 Mark Evans So, Mark?1

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Mark Graham This might be somewhat unconventional approach, but over the years we’ve got about twentypeople at my company and we have well above average experience with Dell over the lastseveral years. Hardware has been for the most part pretty good. In the odd time that we havehad issues with our hardware, we’ve unfortunately found that the service, or just calling techsupport, takes so long that we now do a business calculation, we go- if the desktop after let’s saya year and a half, it’s beyond the warranty but after a year and a half a computer should still befine. If it’s going to cost $500 to replace it, we make business calculations and say, okay, our ITpeople are on the phone, dealing with it having to send it back and forth- forget it, we’ll just goand buy a new product. The bad is that the service is still frustrating whenever we have thoseodd problems, but the good is that the computers are so inexpensive, it’s just better for us to buya new system. I know that’s not exactly glowing praise, but the reason I say it’s unconventionalis because if you get the green screen of death, it’s going to take 5-6 hours to deal with it andexchange it, it’s just better to buy a new one.

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1 1 Jason Duty Well, that’s interesting feedback. You mention long call time, and it’s tough to get resolution.1

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Mark Graham A lot of what Lior was mentioning is that there’s typically either wait times, or having beenbounced around to a couple different people. I must admit it isn’t me on the phone, but itspeople that cost a fair amount per hour that are handling this on our behalf and I know that theyhave had some frustrations and it’s almost the conclusion that we’ve reached that if the system isbeyond the warranty a year or two after the purchase, it’s easier for us to buy a $500 machine.It’s quicker. The good news is that it doesn’t happen all that often. I think we’d be out ofbusiness with that approach. And I think that the last experience was about a year ago, so inlight of what you’ve been mentioning, maybe it’s been improved, so we haven’t had to call in ayear.

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Anne Camden Let me throw in another comment as well. It sounds to me that some of these issues, hopefullywe’ll address over the next year or so to make things easier anyway. In the consumer space for awhile now we’ve got an application called Dell Support Center, so in the particular issues herewhere you say it takes more time than going out and buying a replacement, a hard drive or anentirely different computer. We’re hopeful that people find that Dell Support Center hashardware diagnostics on it and running that diagnostics should get a quick return back whetheryour component has failed or passed. So if you’re in warranty, what we hope to be able to do isto enable you to just go ahead and say, it’s a warrantied component the drivers failed, thememory stick failed, let’s just go ahead and give me your information and get a dispatch going,where you don’t actually have to call and contact and that sort of thing. So that’s something thatI’m looking forward to on the horizon. It’s kind of been a holy grail, I’ve been at Dell for 13years and I don’t know long I’ve been talking about this, but we’re really close to actuallydelivering that now. So that’s one way we’ve been hoping to improve that experience. Ofcourse you’ve got to use the tools you got, you got to come online, for that sort of thing to help,but yeah, that I think is one of our key objectives is kind of how do we just make it simpler.How can we be a little more proactive to give you tools where it’s easier to take care of theseissues without having to go through that kind of struggle.

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Bob Benedetti With customer service in general, my personal experience hasn’t been terribly good. Over theyears, I’ve been responsible for buying a whole bunch of Dell computers for the companies I’veworked for and/or bought one for myself. I’ve only had to call customer service once. And itgot frustrating for a while, this was a few years ago, it got frustrating for a while but then finallyone time I called, about 2 in the morning, or some odd hour or maybe the weekend I don’t knowwhen it was, but I called and I got a guy in Edmonton instead of some guy in Bangalor, and hewas able to answer the question he was able to send me a cd to fix the problem. The feedback Igot when I asked for opinions, was that the general feeling was that the more recent experiencedealing with customer service is a frustrating experience; lots of transfers, phone calls, peopledon’t call back. I had one guy I personally recommended his first Del computer and hesubsequently bought four more, his most recent one was about three years ago, it was anInspiron 800 I believe it was. It had a well-documented defect and he couldn’t get anythingdone. He wrote letters, somebody sent him a $10 gift certificate for his next Dell purchase. Hebrought the computer to show me and pressed the button and you twist it and it turns on<laughing> Apparently if you look online for this particular model, it’s a motherboard problemthat is well documented and that the switch doesn’t work so you twist the computer a little bitand it works and it works fine after you twist it a little bit. But he was very frustrated and hisnext computer will not be Dell. Another report I got was a guy who still pleased with his Dellcomputers and will probably buy another one and but his problem was with the printer. Everytime he called, they acted like he was trying to steal something from them. That was theimpression that they gave him, that’s what he wrote anyway. His most frustrating experiencewas that he bought (before printer cartridges were available in the channel), his printer cartridgesfrom Dell and he bought a box of ten and one was defective and he tried to get it replaced andagain they were acting as though he was trying to steal from them. In his case, he is still happywith both the printer and the computers and will continue to buy Dell, but he was reallyfrustrated with his experiences with the customer service.

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Eric Vallillee I just want to say, now that computers are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper all the time,and it’s getting so much easier going into a Future Shop or Best Buy and buy one. The service Ithink is probably one of the key things as much as the product itself because I just have to tellyou a quick story. I had a friend recently who’s in school with me and her computer she had anHP and it failed and she was able to just go to Best Buy and it was replaced on the spot. Thatwarranty that gives that to you is the same or even a little less then what you pay for technicalsupport with Dell and when you go through the online order process. The thing is If I can justwalk into Best Buy and replace my computer instantly when it breaks and I know if I ‘m goingto be calling Dell and there’s the transfer issues and that kind of thing, Dell’s always going to beat a disadvantage because they have to ship things to you. The only way to make up for that is tomake sure that the people answering the phones are really, really good and aren’t bouncing youaround, aren’t getting frustrate with you, aren’t sending you to weird website s to update yourdrivers, that kind of stuff. It just really has to be simple and it has to be as quick as possible.Otherwise people are just going to say forget it, I’ll pay the same amount and go to Best Buy.

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Jason Duty That makes a lot of sense and I think the comments agree with you 100%, service and support, ifit hasn’t been a bid differentiator in the past, it certainly is now. So I think that, either one of theprograms that I didn’t mention is a little bit on the softer side, we call it the People Program, andone of my peers was responsible for this program. We found that getting in touch with peopleon the front lines much like getting in touch with you all today provides a wealth of informationto the executives who run the call centers to say what the problems were from their perspectivesand based on that feedback we’ve actually developed quite a few things on the people side thathelp our, as an example of our technicians in Bangalore understand how a customer in NorthAmerica tends to react, likes to be treated. So I think that’s an ongoing program that we think isreally important and it’s very cultural in nature. So this is not so much a process, not so muchpolicy, it’s about helping people understand people.

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Eric Vallillee I think that that’s really good, because I had an experience once where I was talking tosomebody in India somewhere and normally the accent is not an issue. I don’t usually havetrouble understanding, but I was really having trouble with this one so I said, I’m sorry can yourepeat yourself a couple too many times and he got frustrated with me, which is like, I paid howmoney hundreds of dollars for the privilege of phoning you today? Generally that stuff doesn’thappen, so I think that that kind of program where you’re dealing with the cultural differencesand just making people understand where other people are coming from is really good.

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1 1Jody Arsenault You say it doesn’t happen a lot, but that’s one of the biggest things I’ve heard too, is when they

phone in and they can’t understand. It’s a big frustration with a lot of my communities.

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1 1Kathryn Lavallee It depends on the person to a large extent. Some people have a better ear for picking that up and

some people don’t. It can be an issue and it cannot, depending on the person.1

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Jason Duty I think that there are communication issues. The feedback we’ve gotten for the most part is thatas long as this person is helping me resolve whatever problems the is, the communication barrieris okay. It’s when communication breaks down and we’re not really reaching some sort of aresolution and that’s what seems to get people frustrated. I’ll say, the People Program, for us atDell was that while over the last 6-7 years as in terms of a leadership team we’ve made it really,really hard for our employees to help customers so we’ve been looking at that over the lastcouple years and looked at policies that generally aren’t customer friendly, looked at processesthat generally cause people to get passed around. So I think some of the programs I mentionedearlier are there to are meant to address these things. A lot of it comes from customers and fromthe front line folks who have the experiences with calls that don’t go so well…

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Bob Benedetti One thing that might help, if there is a way you with phone support, it was a personal one, butfigure out a way to put this concept into phone. I had my first iPad 2 had an intermittentproblem, that was a well-documented problem that was known, I went back to my local Applestore, and I said, this thing is doing this, it might not do it now but it will do it tonight perhaps ormaybe next week some time and the guy just took my iPad and gave me a new one. He didn’tsit there and say go try to troubleshoot this or that, it was an established issue, I had a gooddescription of what it was doing, there was no question it was this issue, whereas my experiencewith Dell customer service and other companies, Dell is by means the worst offender, if there isa way that your scripts could incorporate when there are known issues, so that certain key wordsthe guy types in for the issue he’s presenting, that instead of just the usual script he gets to askthe customer to plug in your computer <laughs>, you know, or something like that, this is afairly common issue and it might speed up the decision making about how you are going to dealwith that and I don’t know how you would work it within the context of a call center type, but ifthere was a way if you got a call and they could see it’s a known issue and you’re not going todo nothing but frustrate the customer if you walk them through plug the computer in, reboot it,reboot it from the CD, when in fact you know you are going to have to replace the computer orsend them a part or something. If there is a way to incorporate that into the system where theguy knows this is a common defect, because nowadays on the internet, people, even relativelyinexperienced computer people, go hunting around the internet and they find it real quick andthat hey! 800 other people have my problem, how come Dell doesn’t know about it. <laughs>

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1 2 Jason Duty That’s really good feedback and a really good suggestion; it’s got a star in my notebook here.

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David Miketinac I do know that there is an individual I meet with back in Austin that actually mine the data fromtech support to kind of proactively engage customers for the soul purpose of trying to findproblems before they start happening in mass. I think the numerics that come back, that are kindof the gate to when we see a certain percentage of these; it triggers a more proactive message. I’ve seen these come out, I know I’ve gotten one myself. I’ll tell all of you, the one thing aboutthese forms that’s always concerning to me, as an individual that really bleeds Dell blue ; from asales perspective, I know that this morning, I’ll use an example, I don’t know why today it’s thefirst in a while, a customer from I don’t know where, and I don’t know what country and I don’tknow for what reason sent me an email that said, the line was, “super frustrated” was one ofthem, I think the other one was “I’m livid.” Phil can weigh in on this one. My instructions backto whomever I sent it to is, usually several words. Take care of it and over satisfy them. Sowhen you hear these sort of examples, and I can’t speak for Phil, only myself, it’s always achallenge for me. I had an incident, Brad knows my dad’s a retired army general and I’ve amilitary background myself, one thing that I’ve learned about military generals is when theyhave a problem, they are usually pretty loud about what’s going on. My dad called me on aSaturday, I happened to be at work, and my dad was having a problem, coincidentally with aprinter. It wasn’t with the technology, it was, you told me that when I bought my printer, I couldrecycle my other printer and I’m calling your customer support and I didn’t get the box to send itback in. I’ve been on the phone for two hours and I’m trying to get the box. And my dad, whoalso has an MBA from Notre Dame, told me that this is why companies fail. It was a ratherlengthy conversation, actually. Him talking to me and me doing the listening.

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1 1 Phil Bryant We all like being dressed down by our fathers <laughs>1

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David Miketinac What I will tell you is that my dad had a problem the other day and the good thing aboutgenerals that I’ve found over the years, when they are satisfied, when you’ve corrected it, they’llalso let you know. My dad said I called this person, it seemed like an easy decision, they calledout that it’s against what they usually do, but it sounds like this is the right thing to do in thiscase. All these issues that you have, my only request is, I know that these transfers happenenough to know that I don’t want to stick my head in the sand and say they don’t. You are goingto get an email, you are going to get a bunch of addresses when you leave this room. Mychildren go to school, my families livelihood is based on the four letters on the wall, of thiscompany. I know how Michael feels when he gets this message. Send a message to Michael. I’ve seen him send things back down, he responds to every customer message that comes his wayand if it goes from Michael to my boss or my boss’s boss and to me, I have to give my bossenough data, what was the root cause, what didn’t we do. Send it to us, it has our name on it too.

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Phil Bryant It’s my job. It’s my job, that’s what I do. I love getting those things, a lot of what Jason’stalking about and what David talked about; somebody has written a procedure or a manual thatsays, this is how you do things. Well there’s just no way to cover every possible situation. Youhave to, like Jason was saying, you have to start building in flexibility to deal with these kind ofthings that come up. That’s one of the great things about my job. I can go, "I know what themanual says, but that’s clearly not right. It’s clearly not working."

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Dave Perry To me the difference between, (but I’ve never had to call customer support in the three months)I’ve had this laptop, but the difference between meek and great customer support and not isownership, it’s feeling that you’re not the one having the runaround. Even being transferredfrom one department to another, the way that it’s being done, sometimes is key. Sometimes it’sseamless, you go from one guy to another, just because you are not being thrown to some queueand you hear some Muzak and you have to wait a couple minutes, when the guy comes back andsays I have such and such on the line- taking that ownership, if it doesn’t follow normalprocedure, at one point the buck has to stop, and whomever has your call takes ownership anddoes what needs to be done. That’s the key difference to me, the bad and the good.

1 2Phil Bryant The ones I get most exercised about internally with our teams, is when we make our internal

problem a customer problem.1

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That’s the one’s where the veins jump out of my neck and you just literally wonder whatsomebody was thinking. Our job is to make sure that that doesn’t happen, our problem isn’tyour problem, if we got to transfer somebody, there’s a seamless way to do it where it doesn’timpact the customer and they actually appreciate oh you got me to the right person, fantastic, I’m so happy, because they saw my problem. The problem is when we try to make it as if it’syour problem because I have to transfer you someplace and you get the Muzak and you wait andit drives us all crazy

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Dave Perry Years ago I was in customer relations for IBM at their business division, and the way I saw itwas a customer support issue was one way to increase the satisfaction of the customer. It’s atouch point with clients and if you can quickly and efficiently resolve their issue, they end thecall saying I bought the right equipment from the right vendor and that’s why I should havebought Dell. At the end of it, versus somebody who’s never had a problem and never called Dellsupport and never experienced that, you have a touch point, this is why you are that important tous and we’ll make sure that by the end of the call, you’ll almost be happy to have had to call usand see why we provide you with great service.

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David Miketinac Last week I taught one of our leadership sessions, leadership imperative, and I could commit toyou that every leader in that room if they got your call from your friend that was frustrated withDell, I’m going to go somewhere else, they would talk to them and in a minute they would buytheir next Dell but I’m assuming it would have been a little longer because they would oversatisfy. I think at the core of every Dell employee and I don’t know if it’s because I’ve beenhere for 17 years or because I believe in the company so much, everyone believes that their jobis just driving satisfied customers.

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1 2 Bob Benedetti Obviously there are some of them that may not think that way.1

1 2David Miketinac And that’s the thing, I think that in those situations you can find if you can’t get to someone that

you don’t believe has that at their core, send it to Phil or I.

1 1 David Gair Can I ask, do you guys…is there an outlet to get what you need?1

1 1

Kathryn Lavallee I don’t think it’s that easy to find and I think that’s a big part of the issue, it’s not easy to find thehigher up to go to if you don’t get satisfaction initially, which is why so many people give up infrustration.

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Eric Vallillee I agree that it’s great that you guys all obviously care about these issues and care about thecompany and I don’t think anyone doubts that, but the problem is when we call the customerservice line, the buck stops with this certain person and after you’ve gone through that, nobodywants to be spending another two hours googling around trying to find who to email about this,nobody wants to do that, so, like you said, you just give up in frustration and just moving on.

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David Miketinac I think to, maybe, but I don’t want to speak out of turn, the segment of the business I manage isheavily relationship sales, the vast majority of it. I can tell you that it may be easier for someonewho has a sales rep that’s been assigned to them for some time and saying to their sales person,I’m totally frustrated, take care of me, and that the sales rep would do that. I think that maybewe could probably do a better job of maybe making sure that when people get frustrated, weprovide that sort of contact information. I suspect that the customer care and tech support folksmaybe would be able to provide that, it’s a great actionable item for us.

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Bob Benedetti I don’t know if it would be again worth considering providing some sort of feedback mechanisminto the system, because obviously you’re doing right, I quoted some of the unhappy ones, but Igot a lot of people who said I’m happy with Dell and I’ve been a customer for 10 years. You doa good job in a lot of cases it’s not like I’m saying you are all doing it all bad, maybe the trick isto identify how you are doing that good job.

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David Miketinac This net promoter I was speaking about, where we send out all those surveys and I guess you arecontingent on people responding to those surveys where they may have gotten to the point thatthey are fed up. I can tell you, any net promoter survey whether it’s positive or negative, themanager out bounds to that customer to say thank you for giving us a great survey or, what’sbroken and how can I fix it.

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Bob Benedetti I deal with the company that hosts my blog, and every time I do an online chat with them, or atelephone service call, the online chat I get a pop up right away and it’s almost like you have tofill it out before you leave. Or else I get an email right after the phone call and it’s an easy formto fill out. It makes me happy to tell when someone does something right or wrong, because thiscompany is priding itself on its customer service and so I think that there must be some betterway to attract people to sign up for my blog and the pop up chases them off, you have to figure away to do it so that you are not so that you aren’t chasing them off…

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1 2 David Miketinac Survey fatigue I think they refer to that as.1

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Bob Benedetti I think again that there’s some way if you can get at least a statistically reliable feedback sowhen it’s going well… It’s probably more important to get the feedback when it’s going well,because then you can see where you are doing it right (yeah) and that’s the key, and anywhere I’ve ever did, I looked too closely at what we did bad because I looked at what we did well andtried to just move it around and make sure everything went that way.

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1 2 David Miketinac That’s great feedback.1

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Eric Vallillee Just on that, I agree with one of the things I’ve noticed with a few different companies is whatthey do is right when you call them, if you are willing to do a quick survey after press one andafterwards it only asked you two questions; were you satisfied and was your issue resolved.Press one for yes and press two for no. I think that would give good feedback not only on everysingle call, but it also gives the people in the call centers some incentive to work towards more…

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1 2 David Miketinac That’s a great idea.

1 1 Eric Vallillee One thing that I really do like, and I know I’ve been kind of rough on Dell this morning...1

1 1 David Miketinac We like you being rough…1

1 1

Eric Vallillee One thing that I really do like is that when I usually buy a Dell customer I buy it through thewebsite and I customize it, but there’s been once or twice where I had to call in to modify or Iforgot this or whatever, and what I really like is that when I do that, I not only get an email backsaying this is your modified order, but it’s from the specific person and you get their name, andyou get their contact- it’s like you are actually dealing with a real person instead of an automatedemail and that not only makes you feel like you are more in touch with them, but it also givesyou that feeling that if I did need to complain or something, I know who to call to resolve theissue

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David Miketinac It’s a great point, Eric. If I’m not mistaken, you guys keep me honest, I believe those emails area function of feedback from our customers, they wanted that more personal touch. Greatfeedback.

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Brad Penner Every one of our email signatures will have our boss’s name on the bottom. So on the bottom ofmine is Phil, for some reason if I get a customer escalation and I’ve lost my mind and I cannotfigure out how to solve it, Phil will know, or Phil will figure out how to find my wits.

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David Miketinac It is interesting; we talk about being a very metrics-driven company. Commonality in emailsignatures where there is corporate mandate to have who is your boss, how am I doing, are you100% satisfied with my boss’s email on there. You talked about that as a little incentive toinsure you have a more positive customer experience. I know in the small medium businesssegment, it’s also on voicemail messages. We constantly want feedback, how we can do better,and the appetite’s there, please keep it coming.

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Lazlo Molnar One more thing…social media, in terms of an outlet, it’s actually a lot more powerful thancustomers realize. Any time we go on our Facebook pages…www.facebook.com/dell or Canadawww.facebook.com/dellcanada or our twitter handles, the @dellcares team, we have our seniormanagers looking at these daily, and basically we escalate these to the right people right awayfor quick resolution because this is very visible to everyone and most of the time we have veryhappy customers come back talking about their great experience with their particular customercare reps so that’s a great outlet.

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David Miketinac I know there’s a segment where we talk about social media, there’s a book out there that some ofyou have read that is called the Thank You Economy and it talks about the power of socialmedia. If you haven’t had a chance to read the book and understand the importance, I don’twant to ruin the book, I would do less of a job explaining it, pick it up it’s a great read

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Jason Duty So again, you can contact me for any support issue and I think I’ve heard a couple that soundlike they are still open and I’d like to talk to people at some point today about those. I’vementioned my team @dellcares, my team is fully empowered to solve anything and everything.They are fully empowered to throw policy procedure process out the window. If it doesn’t makesense and if it’s not getting to a good resolution. I would also say consider that as a hotline foryou and your extended communities. We’d love to help, we would love to help more peoplethan we are today, and really we’re trying to get the word out about the positive experience wethink we can provide through that channel.

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Sarah Richardson I think that Eric, to your point, Jason’s team does a great job handling the individual accounts aswell as support so you know that it’s a real person. There’s a woman at Dell she’s helping methrough my process and she’s kept me updated in real time and how they manage that account,so I think they are doing a good job, you have that direct person and especially for you guys whoare so active and social, the fact that you can get an answer really quickly, right there…we'veseen people respond really well.

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Mark Evans I think one of the challenges personally from customer service, the nature of the web these dayspeople have these expectations that you are going to respond instantly and if you wait minutes ifnot hours, that level of dissatisfaction gets higher and higher. High expectations, to the pointthat you take your computer in and, no questions asked, they replace it- I think consumerexpectations are rising and their tolerance for difficulties are decreasing to Mark’s point aboutfix versus buy, most people are saying forget about it, buy a new one. The other thing I findvery interesting is we’ve become a really do it yourself consumer marketplace. If you havehealth problems, you don’t go to your doctor anymore you go on the internet to figure out if youare having a heart attack or not <laughs> and one of your problems is that people are trying toself-diagnose, you know they go to the Dell forms or somewhere else and either they will bedelighted because they can find the answer or frustrated because everyone else is having thesame problems they’re having.

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Jason Duty That’s a great point. That’s something that we thought we sort of did early on, a few years agoand my couple years in this role it’s become incredibly evident that that's sort of the behavior outthere…and Bob, I think you mentioned why don't you guys share some of these solutions aroundcommon issues and that's something David and I are both trying to increase our efforts on bothe-support and social media, so I know if my team, not only through @dellcares but throughsome of the Facebook pages and community forums and we’ve been really trying to broadcastsome of those solutions around some of those common issues as early as possible. We don’tknow that we have the right formula for that today other than deploying the masses to postsolutions in a few different places. If you all have feedback on the best places to do that orwhere you and your communities go for information, we’d love that feedback.

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Bob Benedetti I don’t know, but I’ll think of one company as an example. My opinion as the absolute world’sworst customer assistance, bar none, they service from a Canadian call center not an offshoreissue, which is Bell. However <laughs> if you are a more savvy customer, you’ll find theyhave a dedicated forum called dslreports.com where you can put in that problem and a Bellrepresentative deals with it and the results are great. These guys got the ability to throw awaythe policy book and things got done, but you have to be into it enough to find this forum. This isone of the things that I found that I never understood how they had this service and yet over theyears continued to provide the world’s worst customer service. Even if you pushed them hardenough, one of the expensive guys from Ottawa calls you, all he is he’s been trained better tohold your hand, but doesn’t do better.

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David Miketinac Bob, it’s always interesting as a transplant to your country, I’m always interested in, we’vetalked about who provides the worst, Bell was one of them but who provides the best customerservice. Who should Dell look to in Canada for the best?

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Lior Hershkovitz I think I can answer in financial services industry. ING Direct is fantastic, Bank City which is acredit union in British Columbia, fantastic. I think you should look at ING Direct, particularlywhat the CEO Peter Shepard is his name, he has his own Twitter and Facebook page andactually directly communicates with customers. I think it’s a very personal touch and just to addto what the gentlemen said about Bell. I’ve never seen anything like this, I think this company ispossessed <laughs> in terms of really bad customer service…a couple of years ago they had alot of their call centers in India. They found that even though they were saving money sendingall the calls over there, they realized that the customer service was so horrendous people wereleaving them for the competition, so during the Olympics during 2010 they were the mainsponsor and they ran a huge advertising campaign that they brought the customer call centersback here to Canada, because the ones offshore were so incompetent that was a big marketingpoint for them, you are calling from Canada, you speak with someone in Canada. It’s somethingyou should take a look at because I know the enterprise consumer has the option to speak withsomeone in the US. If you are on the consumer level, you will basically go offshore- I don’thave a problem with that just as long as they solve the problem but more often than not, theydon’t solve the problem. They just frustrate you even more and whatever the money you saveover there, in a couple years down the road, I’m not going to deal with this crap anymore, I’lljust go to the competition. Apple has good customer service, I know people with apple products,mac books, they said they are not perfect, but in terms of getting things done they are a lot better.A lot less transfers, the reps are somewhat more empowered to think outside the box. Like thatexample when you brought in the iPad 2 they just exchanged it right away. I think this issomething to take a look at. As far as Canadian companies, I think ING does very well, alsocustomer service if you call them there is immediately you are transferred, there is no such thingas the press one, two, three, so you might want to examine that.

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Eric Vallillee My favorite Canadian company for phone service is actually Scotia Bank. They used to havesome of the transfer problems you guys had because it was stuff that only the branch could doand of course the branch closes at 4pm. Then there is stuff only the 1800 number people can dobut in the last couple of years I’ve seen that’s pretty much disappeared and I can call the 1800number until 9pm, and then anyone can do whatever I need them to in my account, look upwhatever info I need. I always have good service, I’m not getting transferred, I’m alwaysgetting a resolution. I think I only had one time there was confusion and their supervisor calledme back in ten minutes and it was resolved anyway. I would suggest looking at them.

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David Miketinac Funny you should say that, I bank at Scotia Bank and the day after I set up my account up and Igot a call from the bank president and now she’s my bank contact. I thought it was old schoollike the US.

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Bob Benedetti TELUS. I’ve been really impressed, I switched my mobile service from Bell to TELUS. And Ipaid a cancellation fee to do it, that’s how mad I was at Bell. I can’t even think of an occasionwhere I had to talk to more than one person. When there has been one occasion for a call back,it came when it was supposed to come. I know the people are working from scripts, but theyseem like better scripts or they are better trained or they care more I don’t know what it is, butyou get an answer from them. On a stupid mistake, I started getting $25 fee for text messagesand clearly at some point when I was half asleep, I put my cell phone number in one of thoseboxes probably. Had I been at Bell, they would have told me, you signed up for it, tough luckCharlie. The guy from TELUS said, well since you got your bill you’ve gotten four more ofthem. I’ll walk you through how to cancel it and if you do it while we’re talking, I’ll give youyour money back. It wasn’t like, I’ll have to transfer you- this is the one guy I had on the phoneand hadn’t generally gotten where one person handles the call, who can do what’s necessary todeal with the call. They are ready to do whatever it takes. I tried an unreasonable request once,it didn’t work. <laughs> If you are going to look at one in Canada, from a fairly large customerbase, I’d say TELUS Is a good one.

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Mike Agerbo Vital has really turned things around as well. When you phone in for tech support you getthrough to a real person right away, they listen to you first and then route you to the appropriateperson you don’t have to keep digging through numbers to hopefully get to the right personwhich you don’t usually and get transferred a few times being able to talk to the person I wasrouted to the right person right away who fixed my issue quickly.

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Dave Perry One I called a few years back was both for the actual console issue and then a XBox Live issue,it was XBox support and they’ve got some kind of automated voice system that’s actually prettyimpressive and I was quickly routed to the right technical department. I had the red ring of deathand had my console replaced and I had an issue with my gamer tag. Both times quickly get to aflesh, a human being, but the process of doing so wasn’t – that’s not what I said, you actuallyspeak and the voice recognition was pretty impressive, eye opening.

1 1 Mark Evans The flipside of that, to give you insight into a company with bad customer service, Rogers…1

1 1 Jody Arsenault Just wait, unless you go to their Rogers care on Twitter, they’re actually….1

1 1 Kathryn Lavallee Phone service is by far the worst phone service I’ve ever used. I’ve never seen one that is harder1

1 1 Jody Arsenault I use Rogers And I love them.1

1 1Kathryn Lavallee I have Rogers And I will not call them and their website is constantly going down- horrific

customer experience.1

1 1Jody Arsenault I don’t like their website, but it depends on how you reach them. Because when you use

twitter…1

1 1 Kathryn Lavallee But not everybody uses twitter…1

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Mark Evans That’s a good point. With twitter, it’s a good and bad thing, because people have learned thatthey can use twitter, they’ll get great care because it’s a public forum, companies tend to bend ofbackwards to do it. The frustrating thing for people who don’t use twitter, you don’t get thesame level of service and this is particularly relevant for Rogers. Rogers will get back to you ontwitter right away, but on their website it’s like they don’t want to deal with customer serviceand it’s so hard to access information. I try to call them, but I can’t find a way to call them, soyou use twitter and then finally someone gets back to you. That’s not the way it should work.

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1 1Eric Vallillee The way you are treated on the phone every 30 seconds being told to use their website,

because…11 111 11

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Kathryn Lavallee The problem is, even when you call, they are not very clear about how to get through to a realperson , you go through a list of options and finally choose an option to contact them, they giveyou five minutes to give you an address so you can write them a letter. The first time I got thatmessage, I thought that’s all their was and hung up the phone it wasn’t until the next time Icalled, I realized that if I stayed on the line after that, after probably ten minutes of waiting, Icould actually talk to a human being. It’s agonizing and I’ll almost do anything not to call thatnumber if I can.

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Stuart R. Crawford One of my mentors when I started my business taught me two valuable lessons aboutcommunicating to customers and clients. One way was to communicate back to your client theway they want to be communicated to. If they are on twitter, phone, email- never assume thatthey want to communicate in the way that you communicate. The second one was, during acrisis or issue, there’s no such thing as over communicating. The worst thing that could happenis if I submit a ticket for support to Dell and I hear nothing back, I assume that the ball hasgotten dropped or nothing is getting done. I don’t mind getting 500 emails back if we are stillworking on the issue, because my military career taught me when we didn’t hear anything backfrom our forward operating posts, we assumed the worst. Even if our officer guy said that thereis nothing to report, no change, we knew everybody was okay. We took that into business, andtook it to our clients and said- we are still working on the problem, working on resolving it, thatwas good enough to let them know we haven’t dropped the ball. I think people get upset whenthey don’t hear anything back and there is no communication coming back. A lot of my clientsare in the service industry as well, they are working as front line people for Dell and they are theones that get the feedback from their clients when things break down so they also want to getthat feedback and feel the love from their vendors because IT service providers are a loyal bunchbut when things start breaking down their easy to switch from Dell to like HP, they don’t eventhink about it, they just do it. Then they realize after that was a big mistake I should have stayedwhere I was because the service at the other place is worse. Not to say that Dell is good and therest bad, it’s just an example that that can happen. Coming back, any issue that’s going on, Iwould appreciate being communicated with constantly until resolution and then that follow upafter the issue was resolved to make sure everything is still working. In IT, things can breakdown again and again and it’s nice to know that the partner the vendor I’m working with, at leasthas- and it could be automated as much as possible, but knowing that there is still someone I canreach out to when an issue arises. That extra step.

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1 2 Dave Perry That extra step at the end when an issue is resolved…closure.

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Bob Benedetti One another outfit you might want to look into- ten years ago, their customer service would havemade Dell look great, which is Videotron in Quebec. They’re integrated communicationscompany, those of you who don’t know it, they are publishing television stations, they sell homephone internet service and cable tv. They’re second only to Rogers In size in Canada. Ten yearsago they were awful. It was almost as though it was an effort to get anyone to talk to. Todaythey are the best just in general, companies like Lesshay that do consumer marketing reports,this company consistently comes out on top, way above anybody else, as far as customer servicegoes. They seem to go out of their way to make it work. I called some time ago just because Iwas thinking about switching from Bell because Bell was overcharging me so I wanted to findout a technical question. I wanted to know if the guy comes to my house to hook up my phoneand internet and they have to put the router in the basement or the modem in the basement. Idon’t know the answer to that but I’ll check on that for you and I’ll call you back. Twentyminutes later someone called me back with an answer. They contract out their installations, sothey did some work to find it. I was really pleased with that one experience with them. If youread the surveys they do, as to customer service for telephone companies and internet providers,and cable companies, Videotron is consistently number one and ten years ago they were number630 on those lists.

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Nancy Polance I just wanted to mention that I got a comment on my blog yesterday about Dell and it said to tellthem their support is awesome. He had a hardware problem, which was going to take a fewweeks to resolve but he got phone calls every couple of days, just to give him an update forwhat’s happening, so he’s very happy.

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Kathryn Lavallee That’s that over communication and I agree. That makes a huge difference any time you need tohave something replaced, anytime you are working through a problem. It is the most awesomefeeling in the world that people are constantly working to make sure you are satisfied.

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Nancy Polance Now, I have a question. One of the readers on my blog want to know why you don’t have aphysical location or store where you can go in for troubleshooting. She mentioned, she’s acustomer for ten years and her father is also a happy customer. Not everyone is on social mediaand they would want to go in for troubleshooting or just go in and look at and experience newproducts you have and play with the gadgets. I know you guys had kiosks years back, but theywant to know why. They are happy customers, but they want to know why you don’t have aphysical location for customers to go to.

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Phil Bryant We’ll have forty in the US before Thanksgiving. They’re will be another series that rolls out inJanuary and another group that’ll role out in the spring. So, we definitely heard that call and weare trying to get them out there as soon as we can.

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1 1 Eric Vallillee Will they be kiosks or stores?1

1 1Phil Bryant The first phase will be different than the prior version of the mall locations, but it’s still a small

mall location and there are other formats we are looking into for later in the year.1

1 1 Kathryn Lavallee Is that forty across north America?1

1 1 Phil Bryant The initial phase is across the US, the Canada piece will come in the second phase.

1 2 Eric Vallillee Are you considering ways to look at…apple store?1

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Phil Bryant We are looking at all different formats right now. The format we have chosen to go with first,right now we are familiar with it, we’ve done a lot of testing over the last nine months, we’vetested it in four different cities, various formats and different models. The one we are rolling outis the one we had the best customer feedback on, we’ve extensively tested them. A couplethings that will be a little different this time, certain of the skews like the new 14Z youmentioned, it will actually be in stock on location so you can take it home that day unlike theprevious model where it all came off at Dell.com. So if you want to do complete configure toorder, we’ll still ship it to you.

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Nancy Polance That's another thing she mentioned was that her father was kind of frustrated just being online. Ifind it is beneficial to have it like an Apple store. If you see that people are in a mall…it’spacked in there, you know what I mean, and there are people troubleshooting and people arehelping you on the spot and that’s what people want. They want to have their problem solved assoon as possible. There’s been a stigma in the past for Dell, that’s set off customers. Theopportunity to go in and see what Dell’s actually offering, myself included, I would like to seewhat’s going on. In the past I’ve had some bad experiences but I think it will bring oldcustomers back is what I’m saying. I think it would be very beneficial for Dell.

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1 2Phil Bryant It goes back to what Mark said, one of the reasons for getting back into that is there’s a certain

way you can present the product and present the brand, represent the.....

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Eric Vallillee I think it’s great because it does make people get more excited about the brand. You always hearthese stories about people camping out outside Apple stores and I don’t think there are any otherbrands you get these stories, not as often at least. I’m not one of these people that walk aroundlike, oh, I have my iphone, but there are people that do feel that having that little apple on theback is something to really be excited and proud of. I think Dell used to have that, the littleround thing on the back of the computer. I think it’s lost it, but I think it’s something you couldbuild back up again because they really are good products.

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Mark Graham One observation I had last time I called in 12 months ago, it is really quick when you call the800 number to get to a sales person but its three or four different buttons to get to customersupport. My view is that it should almost be the opposite if we adopt this. If we believe thatcustomer service is the new form of marketing in the 21 Century. Albeit a much smallercompany then Dell but if you look at a company like Zappos which is in a low margin, verycompetitive business, not dissimilar to Dell. They are a little smaller than Dell, but you can callthe one number, they are fun, they are crazy and they are empowered to solve the problem.They have free shipping back and forth and I’m not necessarily saying that’s the right thing forDell, l but it was the equivalent of an easy button with regard to customer service. You call andyou can get to a person within 15 seconds. I think those are the tiny little tweaks that make adifference in the life of a frustrated, upset customer. As we’ve discussed here, I don’t thinkmany people get that but it’s so simple. I don’t know that it has to cost that much. A salesmanager might be upset with me and say, hey make it more difficult to get to the sales personbut I almost feel that with an entrenched brand like Dell, so many people, with such a hugeinstalled base, to make that customer service experience on the phone easy and quick, it wouldbe a huge boost on sales.

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David Miketinac That’s a great point and another thing, Eric. It’s funny that, as having been at Dell 17 years,only about 9 months of that was selling consumer products. So it’s always interesting to mewhen we talk about the kind of the flash appeal of Dell. We’re talking a lot about the consumerbrand and it’s a flagship brand for us, very critical to our company, it’s our company’s roots. Iwould invite all of you to read about Dell in the business sector over the last year or two. I knowthat our channel friends over there in the corner, one of the things they love most about Dell isour push toward solutions and intellectual property and what the companies we’ve acquired overthe last two years are honestly cutting edge technological products, and storage; our acquisitionof Compellent, our acquisition of EqualLogic. Our channel loves it because for the longest timeDell was seen only as a consumer client provider. If you go out to small businesses and go outto channel partners and go out to larger companies, that’s no longer the case. When you are anaccount executive in one of the businesses, and you are in front and you are talking to customers,you are talking to the CEO and asking, what is your problem and how can technology solve it.There’s all kind of things that you all connect with all the time, like security, virtualization,cloud computing, all these industry trends that we've kind of escaped talking about as we'vetalked about clients that seventeen years of selling solutions in the enterprise class products...you want to talk about being really excited about being with Dell maybe all of you could take alook at our product offerings for businesses and I think it would give you…

1 2 Eric Vallillee …I think your products are great…1

1 2 David Miketinac …flash appeal…1

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Eric Vallillee …flash appeal too, but the problem is when people are walking on the street, they don’t see bigcolorful flyers all over the place and these days that’s important, people see that from Appleeverywhere…

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1 2 David Miketinac Completely…1

1 2Eric Vallillee And when you walk into a Futureshop you’ve got HP and Acer and all these other companies

and it’s right there. With dell, you see it online and it sort of stops there.1

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David Miketinac I completely agree with that. I think the only thing that I would add to that, I think we’re likethat in the storage and cloud computing space. You’re definitely right and I definitely want toget where everywhere we see that our brand is out there like what our friends at Apple have. Ilook at cloud computing and I look at the Compellent and Equallogic solutions, channel partnerslove those products and they make great money from them.

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Mark Evans I don’t want to cut you off, I know you are very passionate about the Dell product line <laughs>but I will. It’s 11:30, we promised people a break, catch up on email things like that. We’llcome back at 11:45 with a panel on product purchase discussion. It’s been a really greatdiscussion, I was wondering whether we were going to cover this much ground and in how longwe would do it. Great insight, but good and bad experiences, I think we got a lot of value out ofit.

1 1

Brad Penner Speak to that. Also, some of my counterparts are in the back that do our merchandizingmarketing and online. We'll certainly engage them if we want to talk anything there. You knowjust to kind of lay a little background on a few things as I was listening to the first session andsome of the things we have done in sales. We have about a hundred and sixty (160) folks inHydrabad, India that do the English speaking portion of our sales and about 45 folks inCasablanca, Moraco. One of the things that seemed to kind of come up in support and things likethat was about communication. One of the things we invested heavily in sales is communicationand not just the language but the culture. How do you talk to your customers? What kind ofquestions do you ask them? They may not know the right question. Many times when I get asales escalation, I think I wish my sales rep would have asked me that. We put a lot of emphasison training.

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One of the things that came up earlier was about scripting. That is something that I really dislike.There are some things that you have to script like you need your DFS (Dell Financial Services)Terms and Conditions, Export compliance and things like that. We threw a lot of that away andsaid, “Let’s go hire great people, give them great training and let them have a dialogue with thecustomer and let's engage with them where they want to engage”. We have chat functions whereyou can chat with us or go online with us. If you want us to walk you though the web process,we can actually walk you through it on your screen. We're looking at all these areas. We arereally focused on how we sell a solution. The customers are changing the way they usetechnology very rapidly. We are trying to change with that. I would really like to get some – startwith a question around what do you like or what don’t you like about your purchasingexperience with Dell? What do your followers like or not like?

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Eric Vallillee I love being able to compare all the different options. That is something you don’t get with a lotof other companies. Obviously, you don’t have three computers in front of you that you can playaround with but it is good to know why this one is 200 dollars more and this one is 300 dollarsmore and have that broken down for you.

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Kathryn Lavallee I know that my family has quite a few Dell computers. My sister just graduated last year and hergraduation gift was a Dell laptop that my mom and my step dad got for her. One of the thingsthey adore about Dells is how customizable they are. That is the one thing that keeps mystepfather coming back again and again. For him, that is a huge selling point because hercomputer is completely different from his computer but they are both perfect for them.

1 1 Mark Evans Does anyone else have a few experiences good bad or indifferent?1

1 1

Joe Mallon I already mentioned to Jason the problem I had last year where I purchased on line where mydelivery was delayed and I could not get feedback as to why it was delayed or what problem wascausing the delay.

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Eric Vallillee I actually put an order in last January for items other than computers that I was buying. It was onBoxing day. I got a whole bunch of it on time, but some were delayed. I got emails that said whythings were delayed. I understand why things get stalled and it turned out to be a goodexperience overall. There was one wireless keyboard that I ordered that was wrong. I got anemail letting me know that the one that I wanted was not available anymore. They asked if theycould change it and I said sure.

1 2Phil Bryant I understand there was one person down there that had an issue with a delay for about thirty (30)

days and you couldn’t get any information?1

1 2 Joe Mallon Yes, there were no emails. I could only get information through tracking it.1

1 2 Phil Bryant So there was just no status available? All along, you didn’t get any update?1

1 2Joe Mallon I submitted a ticket and I got a non committal reply about when the delivery date was going to

be. You mentioned a survey. I don’t believe I got a survey. This was last year.1

1 2 Jason Duty Maybe it was February or March when the government monopolizes their last minute binge.

1 1

Mark Evans There is a lot of talk this morning about the retail experience and how being able to take yourcomputer into a store makes a difference. I am curious about people’s attitude about the onlineexperience. Is that a differentiator for anyone?

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Mike Agerbo I get a lot of callers into my radio show. It is a call in show. Generally Dell is highly regardedfrom the purchasing side. A lot of callers would like to see more of a retail presence for peopleto actually take their computer in to a location. Many of the older people don’t like to ship thingsback and forth.

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David Miketinac So Brad had mentioned real quick the organization that supports consumers. I would just like todifferentiate real quickly the small and medium business team here in Canada. Of my 8 directreports, 6 are bilingual so we have both languages integrated into all we do. We have technicalsales. We have services sales. Software and peripheral sales. We do have folks in India, that dochat for unassigned relationship small medium business customers. That is very, very smallportion of our business.

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Mark Evans What I find interesting about the retail experience these days is that web is a great research tool .Within a digital age, there is still the touch issue. People want a tangible product. When you aretalking about more expensive products, you can buy in a book. It is a challenge when you aretrying to advocate that experience online. It would be interesting to get some insight about howthat Dell buying experience has evolved or will evolve.

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1 1 David Miketinac Are you surprised that it is that big?1

1 1

Bob Benedetti Again, along the same lines, people like to touch the product. I for example, read all my bookson my reader, yet I don’t like shopping for books online. I usually go into a store and scan thebarcode in and then order it on line. If there is a way you can get the tactile experience. I thinkthe consumer market is open. If anyone has had to buy a computer at Future Shop or Best Buy.If you get someone who knows what it is or what it does, you are lucky. There reps over sellthem. People get disappointed and people bring them back. If you can figure a way. That marketis gettable. The trouble is it is a commodity now. The prices are not exactly the most excitingplace in the world to be. But, the market for specialty laptops is sitting there waiting to be pickedif you can figure a way to combine the touchy feeling thing versus the getting the versatility youhave about ordering on line. I am boring. My personal experience with Dell has always beenpositive. Everything came when it was supposed to come. People are weary of going online andordering something for 500 dollars.

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Kathryn Lavallee You definitely exclude some of your demographic. There are some people that will not everpurchase anything online. I am sure they will come around, but it will be at an age whereeveryone will be shopping online. They were raised to believe that your credit card informationis something to guard with your life.

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1 1 Bob Benedetti Of course, they will happily give it to a waiter in a skuzzy bar.

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Nancy Polance I was telling Brad that the older generation is not as computer savvy. I use a relative as anexample. All he knows how to do on a computer is Google and YouTube. If he wantedsomething with computers, he would ask one of us and we would go with him to pick it out.With his poor hands, that touch is very important to him. The touch issue will really help thatdemographic that won’t or can’t go online.

1 1

Stuart R. Crawford The question I was going to ask is “What is the percentage of purchasing? How much is from theSMB space verses consumer and enterprise. Our biggest challenge in the SMB and enterprisespace is that our clients this instant gratification type of people. Many of you in the room are thatway. We want it right now. They fail when they plan to hire staff. So we are always the lastnotification and we have to drop ship it. In the IT space, sometimes that means going to TechData or Ingram and buying two distributions and getting them over night shipped. Which is goodthat Dell has relationships in that distribution, but we don’t get that specialized product that wewant. The clients who plan effectively and are ok with ordering it online or through the rep.When I bought this laptop, I actually called it in on the phone and he walked me through thewhole process. That was a very pleasurable experience by the way, It was great versus buying itonline. But I still have the instant gratification. I was asking how fast you are going to get it tome. Knowing I had to wait seven to ten (7-10) business days was tough.

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1 1 David Miketinac It ships fast and then just sits.1

1 1

Stuart R. Crawford Exactly. I want to know in Dell's overall revenue model. What is the percentage of the SMB,Enterprise and consumer. That is what should be the focus of how we deliver to market. It makessense to me from a business point of view.

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Brad Penner Eighty five percent (85%) Dell’s revenue comes from our other businesses outside of consumer.However, Consumer is a big brand awareness in the marketplace. Every consumer is also aworks for a company or owns a company. I know a lot of you in here own companies. It is thatwhole Prosumer and consumerization that are seeing a lot of changes. One of the things. Wetalked about delivery. Fast shipping is something we are very focused on in Canada. We knowwe want to get the products to customers faster and we want to be accurate with our delivery.Chat sales give more accurate lead times. If you are going to completely customize. We workvery diligently on reducing those lead times. We are working very hard. David can talk moreabout fast ship in SMB. As we move into the holiday buying season, you are going to see moreand more ships fast options from us because we know that folks want that product as quickly aspossible. Our customers shop multiple channels. It is pretty rare today that we get a customerthat phones us that has not been online or vice versa. With the Dell experience centers, it willjust be one more opportunity for us to meet our customers where they want to be met.

1 1

David Miketinac Ships fast was a big issue for me. When I came here to Canada, I looked at the amount of shipsfast that they were selling and it was actually less. It kind of stymied me. We have put a lot ofemphasis on ships fast. Well over 200% unit growth in ships fast product. It is funny that youmentioned something. You mentioned. As a visitor to your country, I see a lot of differencesbetween the US and Canada. You mentioned that you shop in bookstores. Bookstores in the USare almost impossible to find now.

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1 1 Bob Benedetti Well also, it almost impossible to find here too.1

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David Miketinac There is a pretty sizable Chapters bookstore here just a couple of blocks from my house. In fact,we bought a Texas cookbook at the one right around the corner from our house. Do you thinkthere is a difference between what Canadian customers want verses what customers from thestates want from Dell? As far as getting things quickly and shopping online. It seems to me thatcustomers in the states want to shop more online verses customers in Canada but I don’t haveany empirical data to support that.

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Nancy Polance I know myself that if I want to make a large purchase, I want to go and see it first. I will buy itonline. However, I need to see if it works for me first. My American friends say “I buyeverything online.” I don’t know. Maybe there is a difference.

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1 1Jody Arsenault One difference is, Amazon is hugely popular in the states. In Canada, the bloggers say that no

one is buying that way.1

1 1Kathryn Lavallee I personally do a lot of online shopping. I think it is an amazing tool. I know I am very much in

the minority.1

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Eric Vallillee I think it is telling though. I think the only reason that Chapters does well with online sales isbecause they discount their online sales by 30%. We have about five big box Chapters bookstores in Ottawa. The fact that they can slice their prices by 30-35% to match Amazon is telling.I think there is a market for that mixed kind of approach. People want to see and touch theproducts then go home and order online or maybe order from the kiosk.

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David Miketinac Speaking from a complex solutions perspective, I find that in Canada, Canadian customers wantus to dispatch a lot of resources to scope out very complex solutions driven verses in the USwhere it seems like they are more apt to have discussions over the phone. I do believe thatCanadian customers require more field presence, especially in the small and medium businessbase. I find that the channel partners in some of these local cities provide such a huge benefit toDell and the partners which is why we are seeing such traction in the channel. It is very curiousto me because I agree that as we go and build out businesses that map the small and mediumbusiness, we have got to have a much more heavy field team

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Kathryn Lavallee I think that is probably because small business is such a huge part of Canadian culture. Andbecause of that, people are used to having that one on one personal approach when they shopanywhere. The country was founded on small business and it is still everywhere veryprevalently. That is what people look for. If they don’t have their guy to go to, it is not the sameexperience.

1 1Mark Evans Lunch is going to come in at 12:30. If you want to continue conversation, just grab your lunch

and sit back down because we have barely scratched the surface here.

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Eric Vallillee I was going to say that all of my business is intangible stuff. Still, it is very rare that I will everhave a customer that just wants to talk over the phone. Everybody wants to come in and see thesamples in person and go over that kind of stuff and have that one on one physical contactwhether we meet at their office or somewhere else. Nobody really wants to just sort of doeverything on line. For something that is nothing to come and touch or come and see, it is prettytelling. When you are talking about buying five or six computers for your business, I can seewhy people want to see how it will work for their employees and want to talk to someone one onone.

1 1Brad Penner I am kind of curious about financing a little bit. Whether it is consumer or whether it is small to

medium business. How important is it to you and your customers to have a financing option?1

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Stuart R. Crawford Financing is huge. I would not be able to run my business cash flow without some sort offinancing. I learned early in my career. It is funny, I am writing a blog for Amex on this rightnow. You know that the investing in a depreciating asset is such a foolish position in myopinion. I would rather keep my money and invest in something that appreciates. Computers andcars are depreciating assets. After three to five years, there are no longer any value left. I wouldrather lease that get the tax advantages up front and preserve cash flow in my business versesbuying a laptop for fourteen or fifteen hundred dollars. I will eventually giving it to my kids infive years. Actually, eighteen months seems to be my churn on my machine these days. I willpay this thing off. I am used to paying two or three hundred dollars every month for technology.From a business point of view, it is a sound strategy. For micro-small businesses, there might bea different strategy. My company is six people so it just makes sense for me to lease or financetechnology.

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Mark Evans Price has been mentioned a lot and commodities. Basically, if it’s broke, throw it away. I amcurious about how price plays into the whole buying decision and how do you decide how muchof an influence it has on the brand you buy.

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Lior Hershkovitz I think that pricing is very important. First of all financing is very important when you areindependent and all of my systems are bought interest free. I also try to buy when you can getpretty big discounts. If you have repeat customers, I think you should have an option. I think it isimportant that communication is important. I think there should be a quota. If you buy x amountof product from Dell within a certain time period, you should enjoy preferential interest rates andbetter terms and maybe slightly lower prices because it is customers who constantly buy fromyou, you have brand loyalty. Consumers who buy even more should have dedicated discount.

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Eric Vallillee The business side of that is different. In terms of consumers, look at Apple. Often you are payinga lot more for the same thing that just has the apple stamp on it. There is something to be said forflashy products. People will pay for that. Dell is very good at sales. There is often 30% off salesand I am often drawn to that kind of marketing plus the very good product. I am not going to beas worried about one or two hundred dollars if the quality is there.

1 1Lazlo Molnar We have gotten a lot of feed back on price. We do a lot of border shopping. There are many

people who buy PO Boxes on the border to pick up their products.1

1 1 Stuart R. Crawford I will drive to Niagara Falls for 3.44 a gallon gas.1

1 1 Phil Bryant That is one of those US/Canadian differences.1

1 1David Miketinac I have found in previous months when the Canadian dollar was at an all time high that the cross

border shopping didn’t happen more.1

1 1 Bob Benedetti It is a warranty issue.1

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David Miketinac When shipping across the border, I never approve it unless we can meet the export complianceguidelines. I understand the cross border shopping but it is important to understand that we as acompany are following those agreements.

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1 1 Kathryn Lavallee Customs can be a huge issue.1

1 1 David Miketinac It is a compliance issue and it is one that we follow well.

1 2

Bob Benedetti Pricing is an issue. Best Buy and Staples have created the concept of the $499 computer. Itdoesn’t matter what brand it is. If you look at their circulars, it just says $499 computer anddoesn’t say much at all. People are not being trained in terms of what they should be buying andthey buy something with a slow CPU and they wonder why they are not happy with them whenthey get them home. It has impacted the market to the point where it is tough when someonegoes online and actually reads about what they need. A lot of people buy for their business atStaples or Best Buy. It is tough to try to inform the consumer. Cameras for example have notbeen impacted as much by this price sensitivity. It is easier to sell someone on a better camera.

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1 2 Stuart R. Crawford The consumerization of IT is where I can buy a 499 laptop, then want to hook it into the server.

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David Miketinac You bring up a fantastic point. The technical resources and the people we have in our small tomedium business group are really putting a huge focal point and I think Dell has been doing thisfor several years. Channel is an extension of this. We are going out and using technology tosolve big business problems. The client connecting into that other business problem is definitelya big piece for us. Right now, the technology that we are spending a lot of time on now areserver, storage, help solve those problems. I honestly believe that all of our client sales clearlycustomers always say that price is important. But for the IT professional and for the smallmedium business that has a small back office, the compatibility comes at a premium and theydon’t want to sacrifice the compatibility for price. From a small medium business perspective,we are focusing a lot of attention on server storage. Clearly the client bolts into that but thecompatibility and the usability is mission critical for small to medium businesses. We are notgoing to run to that low price band. It is just not who Dell is.

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David Gair You touch on real issues. A lot of merchandizing Best Buy and Future Shop. At the same time, alot of you will pay a premium for Apple. What do you value? What would make you realize a$750 notebook? What would make work for you.

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Eric Vallillee I think that companies like Apple that get people to pay that premium are really good atmarketing. They simplify and clearly explain what this computer will do for you. I am sure all ofus in this room know what the difference between a 1 GB hard drive and a 1 TB hard drive. Sowhy not market it the way the iPod people used to do and say this computer can hold this manymovies from iTunes, this kind of thing in this many seconds. Oh you want to talk to yourgrandkids? You can do video chat. Have the technical specs there in the background, but reallyplay up the specifics of this is what you can do with this computer. On the smaller size,businesses that don’t have dedicated IT people, so it is going to be the lawyer who owns thepractice making the ultimate decision. Tell them what they can do with your servers or withCloud. I know Microsoft has been doing a lot of marketing with the cloud technology. For thosepeople who don’t care about what a gigahertz is, if you can tell them clearly, quickly andvisually what you can do with it, that is where you will break through and people will pay morefor your product.

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Brad Penner I think that is what we do well online or over the phone. We have been really successful in themedium to high price bands. On the consumer side, if you haven’t seen some of our newproducts, we have them over here. We have one of the strongest portfolios and line ups that weever had in consumer. Our 15z product was very successful in the thin and powerful. It made avalidation there. The new 14z.

11 2 So take a look at those during the breaks and you will see a lot more.1

1 2Eric Vallillee On the more info button, let it pop up with a Dell recommends. It really is helpful to see the

difference.

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Dave Perry The big difference between what Apple has done is that they are not selling nuts and bolts. Theyare selling an experience. Whether it is on the consumer side with this is what you can do, evenon the enterprise and small medium side of this is what it will allow you to do to grow yourbusiness into something bigger. If I look at your website and it has XPS and gaming. If I don’tknow what XPS is, why would I click on that? When I need a computer, I need it to dosomething, not because it has a faster CPU verses this model or that model. There is a task that Iwant to achieve whether it is business, personal or both. If you clearly get that message out, it ismuch easier for me from a consumer who doesn’t know how computers work but knows whatthey want to do, it is much easier for that experience to come through. If once I get there, thesupport is there and I can call and get someone on the line instead of pushing a bunch ofnumbers, then I am hooked. Why would I consider a couple of hundred bucks if at a missioncritical time, I can get it fixed and move on.

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Stuart R. Crawford I don’t know how many Dell folks that know this. There is a great book out there called Stuckwith Y by Simon Sineck and he clearly defines the difference between Apple and Dell and howApple was successful in their market at high value high priced product and Dell was in the (theydon’t call it lower price) . Apple was selling an experience. He compares Dell to being morefocused on the speeds and feeds. This was very true in the early days and it is changing withtime. When this book was written it was probably very true. Apple was selling experience andthe other IT was selling speeds and feeds

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Jason Duty I would argue that Apple has gone a step further than that particularly with the iPad and iPhone.Where you used to buy devices with a specific purpose in mind. Now people buy the devices andthen see what they can go do with this thing.

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Stuart R. Crawford We talk to our clients every day about how their product has to become an app that they caninstall on an iPad. When they get there, gone are the days of installing CDs. That is where we aregoing to get to.

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Bob Benedetti Some of the concept of selling Why Dell is a marketing problem that has to be answered. I knowthat most of the business comes from other places, but the consumer and the small business userwho functions much like a consumer. Otherwise, they are brought into this price thing and theydon’t know why they should spend more money on something. If there is a way that Dell can beidentified. It is all experience. I heard about Dell twenty something years ago because a friendbought one. I bought a Dell desktop and I liked it and told friends about it. Then some yearslater, I got into a position where I was a buying authority for a fairly large company and as aresult, bought 600 Dell desktops so the impact you have on the consumer today can be the VP ofthe big enterprise. We are all even when we are spending in these days our company’s money.We think about experience. Gone is the day where people say you can’t lose out by buying IBM.Maybe Dell can get the “You can’t lose your job by buying a Dell”. The impact of the consumeror individual user is more important than his dollar number would indicate to the business.

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Tara Lemieux I think this is really wonderful feedback. From a consumer marketing perspective, we areinvesting a lot more in brand recognizing that this is really a tough place to compete be whenyou see those flyers every day driving price points down. It is really difficult for us so we reallydo have to take it up a couple of notches and explain why. It is tough to compete. You haveheard a lot about the 15z and 14z. The thin and powerful line up is all about this new elevatedbrand. It has taken us a while to get there for sure.

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David Miketinac I think the strategy from a marketing perspective around pricing. To me was always a little bitdifficult because I don’t think on the small medium business side that we ever made a focus tomake it a price game. I think as we become a more enterprise, advanced systems ladenorganization, we have really put all of our marketing and focus on what are your problems andhow can technology solve that problem? I am just a firm believer in our Compellent andEquallogic products, our storage products is that these products are so cutting edge and soeconomical by the TB, that it not only attracts CEOs. Not only is it world class technology, but itis secure and going to save you money. There is another old saying that if you get in the backoffice, you get in the front office a little more easily. Right? I think for us, our key focus is goingto be providing these technology solutions that help those small business and medium businessesgrow and thrive. I am a firm believer that if they like that technology and the client will comealong with it. It has been a strategy we have been using for some quarters thinking that we couldget better at it. The real focal point for us is going to be on the enterprise side server storage,services I think is a huge focus for us. The size of Dell is immense and the amount of intellectualproperty that we possess and we acquire will help to channel. We will help these smallbusinesses. I believe they will find their way to Dell Client that way. They seem to beresponding. Especially if you go look at IDC numbers on service and storage, I like where Dellsits.

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1 1 Bob Benedetti For most of us here, our feet are firmly placed in the consumer realm. Maybe it works for Dell.

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David Miketinac Part of our new brand campaign is a focal point on how technology helps companies and helpspeople. If you go and look at the market data with regards to what Dell is doing. As a consumermyself, I want to buy that technology that not only rings true for me in my home, but also ishelping companies.

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Nancy Polance You know what was really nice to see from Dell was the Do More videos. They were amazingbecause I actually sat there and looked through all of them. They were well made and highquality. They showcased all the services, each product and to me, it shows you what you can dowith the actual hardware and how it would fit every walk of life whether you are a consumer or abusiness person or in the classroom. That to me was really well done on behalf of Dell.

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David Miketinac It is easy for me as a 17 year Dell guy to gush about the technology. To actually be part of theevents in the 17 years where Dell stepped up and delivered something amazing. I do believe thatwe need to do a lot better job putting that brand out there and let other’s see it.

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1 2Bob Benedetti If I were going to do a server farm, I would think totally differently than if I were buying fifty

computers.

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Phil Bryant When you talk about the $399 computer, I just have to say that is just bad selling. Just to bemore blunt about it, right. Because I look at what Brad does. Brad doesn’t sell any $399computers. In this supposedly commoditized world, when people go to Dell.com or they callBrad, they don’t buy a $399 computer because Brad talks to them about what they are trying todo with it and they leave satisfied with what they get. It is not a door crasher and it is not a 2 gigsystem that doesn’t satisfied your needs or weighs half as much as you do. It is possible not to dothat. I have heard a lot of feed back about Gee, you ought to be in retail more. That is one of thereasons I am not in retail. If somebody can’t sell the value, I am not going to give awaycomputers that are going to do a bad job.

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1 1 Bob Benedetti I wasn’t saying that they should sell the $399. I am just saying that is a market challenge.1

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Phil Bryant There is a market challenge and there is a sales execution challenge. Even where the marketinghas been, Brad is successful selling value in that environment already. Dell.com is successfulalready selling value in the face of all that. It gets down to whether or not you understand thecustomers needs. Do you have empathy for the customers needs. Are you trying to sell to thoseneeds. It takes time. It is harder. It is easier to give something away and not worry about it. It isharder to train people like Brad does.

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1 1 Dave Perry Building your relationship is way better than soup of the day computers.

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Eric Vallillee Those small retail environments. I think it is a great opportunity. That is what Apple does in BestBuy. They are getting people to spend two thousand dollars. Even the table tops are specialwood that was selected by Steve Jobs. If you build up a really cool brand that you put out inmalls, it is even more visible. If you can make it look high quality and have really good peoplethere it will really build that feeling of “yes, I want a Dell”.

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1 2 Nancy Polance You know Apple even has vending machines in airports.1

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David Miketinac I talk about my 17 years at Dell. I spent 9 of the 17 years in the large enterprise space which wasselling to the biggest companies around the globe and I will tell you. I will ask all of you this?Do you think that fortune 500 companies are buying $399, $499, $599 computers?

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1 2 Bob Benedetti No

1 1 David Miketinac Then what are they buying?1

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Dave Perry They are buying the tool to meet a business need. When you said there is a big differencebetween consumer and business needs, but in effect at the end of the day if you have an order fora set of servers for a server farm for 100k and then comes along XYZ company that will sell it toyou for a third of a price. You are not necessarily going to jump on the cheaper deal, you aregoing for the name recognition and the past experience.

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David Miketinac That is my point. I sell to small medium business. They buy more Optiplex. They are more ofthe same systems that large companies by from Dell. They buy from Dell because, like Apple,they like the technology that we offer on the Optiplex system. I would tell you that the sameintelligence that goes into those Optiplex class systems, goes into the Vostro class andDimension class systems, goes into Alienware.

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Brad Penner You know, one of the things we hear a lot from customer that escalations come from a salesstand point where people who say “I wish I would have talked to my sales rep about this becauseI assumed that any computer could do this or could integrate with that or I would have enoughspace or whatever it might be. Our big focus is to ask a ton of questions because you have tocommunicate in the customer’s language. To Phil’s point about taking time. One of the thingsthat we focus on is that it is not about a transaction. It is about helping the customer buy. If youare calling in on a $399 ad and want to compare a Dell to it. We are selling a solution becausewe are selling a lot more than just PCs. How does that integrate with all of your technology? Wefind that we have to let them think about it for a few days after we talked to them. We find that isthat they usually come back to us after they think about it. There is a little anxiety in letting themgo. It is about the customer experience and building that relationship. We talked about a loyaltyprogram. We are looking at that. We are piloting something for the holiday season. It is also thatwe have implemented a virtual store where we don’t talk about calls. We don’t talk about calls,we talk about customers. We have created a store where if you want to talk to your original salesrep again, you can. If they are not there, you are going to get someone right away. Or you canleave a message for that original rep in case you want to talk to them.

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1 2Mark Evans We have lunch going. It is in the back. We will take an hour break and then we will come back

for product discussion.

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Mark Evans Ok. I think we are going to go ahead and get started. I hope everyone enjoyed lunch and had agood enough break to tweet and blog. So, for the next hour Anne Camden is going to tell usabout her children and lead a discussion about product.

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Anne Camden As I mentioned earlier, I have been with Dell a long time. I am actually something of ananomaly. They hired me in 1998 to do PR for our corporate desktops. From there, I went tocorporate laptops. From there, I went to consumer products. I did the same job within Dellacross all of our product lines for almost twelve years. They would come to me every few yearsand say “You are not acting like a normal Dell employee. You are supposed to change and dosomething else every so often”. But, I love what I do. I love our products and I love talking topeople about our products. My biggest bad habit is that I talk to people and I want you to talkback to me.

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I am a near and dear grassroots product evangelist for Dell. I believe in our products. I was therewhen we were taking our corporate laptops, putting a different color on them and handing themto consumers and they loved them. In the background, the engineers were going crazy becausethe consumers were saying “I want speakers that really work. I want to change my volume onthe fly. The corporate consumers were saying “I don’t want these loud speakers on our laptopsbecause they will interrupt the executives!” Trying to balance those two worlds in one productbecame unattainable. Finally, we said enough. We have to develop products that meet consumerand small business need versus products that meet a large corporation’s need. Since that time, Ihave been on the consumer side and we have been doing some exciting things.

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General question. How many of you have a desktop at home? {Hands raise} How many of youactually use that desktop? Is it gathering dust?

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1 1 Jody Arsenault My husband uses it.1

1 1

Anne Camden OK, when you replace it. Are you going to replace it with a laptop or a desktop? {Mixedanswers} Would you ever put a desktop in your kitchen? {Mostly no} Would you ever put it ina public place where you could use it as a TV, or phone?

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1 1 Kathryn Lavallee Yes!

1 2

Anne Camden We have an all in one that we just announced earlier this week. I tried to get one here, butcustoms became an issue. It is really nice with a full HD display. It comes with a blue ray option.It is a swiss army knife technology. It is a TV, stereo, telephone, access to the world. What wewant to hear is what are you all doing with your systems that we can design for? How many ofyou carry a 17 inch laptop?

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1 2 Kathryn Lavallee Me!1

1 2 Anne Camden Why do you carry that huge laptop?1

1 2Kathryn Lavallee I need a full keyboard because I type a lot and I type fast. I like typing on a desktop. If I could

carry a desktop with me, I would.1

1 2 Bob Benedetti You would be better off bringing a small laptop and a big keyboard!1

1 2Anne Camden If I made it easy for you to buy a smaller laptop with a wireless, full sized keyboard to go with

it....1

1 2Kathryn Lavallee I love a full keyboard. Yes, I loathe the track pad. I carry a full size, wireless, optical mouse with

me as well.

1 1Anne Camden OK. How many of you are touch typists? (Most) Is the keyboard make or break for you? Do you

live with it or is it something that causes you to move on.1

1 1 Stuart R. Crawford My keyboard. I love Dell, but this is the biggest frustration with buying a machine right now.1

1 1 Anne Camden Which one is it?1

1 1 Stuart R. Crawford I have the XPS 15 inch1

1 1 Anne Camden The Z?1

1 1Stuart R. Crawford I am a heavy typer because I learned how to type on punch cards. I think the mouse goes crazy.

But I am probably not the normal typer.1

1 1

Anne Camden That is a very polarizing keyboard. Some of you have asked whether or not we get informationfrom customers. We do. There are a couple of ways we do this. There is a Dell. How many ofyou research products before you buy it? Have you looked at dell.com at our customer ratingsand reviews. We publish all of them. Positive or negative. If they are about the product. If theyare talking about Windows, we won’t publish that. If a customer has feedback, we will publish itgood or bad. If you will look at the 15z reviews, there are about 30% that say that they do notlike the keyboard to the point that they want to return the product. There are 40% that say thekeyboard is nice. They are not saying that they are keeping it just because of the keyboard, butthat they don’t have any issues with it. My job is to gauge feedback like that. Are you saying thatthe trackpad goes crazy?

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1 1 Stuart R. Crawford My mouse goes crazy. It chimes all the time.1

1 1 Anne Camden Have you updated your drivers?1

1 1 Stuart R. Crawford I am a technical person. That is the last thing I would think about doing.1

1 1

Anne Camden Now we are coming to an issue where people say, "What do you do before you launch yourproduct? What is your process on checking systems before they get there?" At some point, wehave to draw a line in the sand. It is a pretty compressed process. You have your mechanicalengineers that dealing with final tweaks, fitting, and does this part match this part and are weallowing for thermal dispersion, do the thermals allow you to get rid of the heat. The electricalengineers are dealing with a lot. We are having to qualify about 100 third party software andhardware components. The amount of work you have to do before you actually say “go” isphenomenal. To keep up with current technology, Intels chunking out a new processor every 12months or so, Microsoft is launching a new OS every 18 months or so, NVidia and ATI areleapfrogging graphics every 6 months or so. At one point we have to draw a line in the sand andsay this is the launchdate. Occasionally, we will have a helpful customer that will find an issuethat we missed.

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We found out that the track pad on the 15z when we launched it is not as stable as we wouldhave liked. Our customers have said that they cannot turn it off. That seems like a pretty bigmess. I don’t know how that happened but we went back to the engineers and the thing withengineers is that they say, that is fine, but I have to replicate that. They go back to their labs andset up everything. They want all the information from the customer. How did this happen? Whatwere they doing? What time of night? What day was it? What phase of the moon…and so on.Finally, they replicate it, then they fix the problem. They have issued a new track pad driver andit should fix it. I advise you to do that.

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1 2 Stuart R. Crawford I am doing it right now.1

1 2 Bob Benedetti The scroller is a little sensitive. I have modified it, but it is still temperamental.1

1 2

Anne Camden Again, that is the software that comes with the trackpad so you can go in and modify that. Thereis some information on how we launch product. We have a team of sustaining engineers thatkeep up with a product after launch. We have actual laboratories where if you walk in, there willbe 5 or 6 laptops. They are shaken up. The open and close the hinges. There is a pogo stick thatcomes down on the keys ten thousand times. We are trying to replicate the average life of alaptop over 3 years in a 6 month time.

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1 2 Bob Benedetti Do you spill coffee on it?1

1 2Anne Camden We do that on the ruggedized ones because we have to test those to go into rough environments.

OK time, for me to look for questions. Anybody?

1 1Bob Benedetti I like little laptops. My favorite ever was a Dell 12 inch that had silver and white on it. It was

really nice with a full size keyboard.1

1 1Anne Camden I am thinking that was probably the Inspiron 700. I would be surprised if it had a full sized

keyboard. 13 is about the limit that lets you have a full size.1

1 1 Bob Benedetti It felt like one. Maybe there is not market for them?1

1 1

Anne Camden The industry goes in cycles. The netbooks launched and everyone loved them, but then peopletreated like they were full grown laptops and they would open up 15 and 16 emails and try towatch a youtube video, then go shopping on Amazon. At one point, someone would crash. Toget the small size, you gave up memory and performance.

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1 1 Bob Benedetti This was expensive, so I didn’t give up anything. I think it was a 700M.1

1 1 Anne Camden It was a cult favorite along with the XPS 1210.1

1 1 Bob Benedetti This was 10-12 years ago. It was $2,000.

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Anne Camden Here is a 15 inch that if y’all haven’t, I would like to go ahead and pass around. If you have nothad a chance to view it. It is the XPS15z. It has been out since May. There is a method to mymadness because I want to try to make sure everybody understands the amount of engineering,ingenuity and design that went into bringing this product to market is pretty cool. Many peoplelook at it and think, it is the Macbook Pro rip off. You can put it on a table and people think thatis what it is from a distance. Then I get the comment “Dell, why can’t you design something thatlooks really nice!” How do I combine those two comments? I am going to start with you becauseyou are carrying a three year old laptop. This is the studio with the extended battery. It has thesame screen size on it. Has it done well by you?

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1 2 Eric Vallillee Yes.1

1 2 Anne Camden Which would you rather carry?1

1 2 Eric Vallillee This one! Are you offering?1

1 2 Anne Camden See me at the end of the day.

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I will tell you that we have one on-going industry issue. The number one request that we get is“why don’t you put a blu ray drive on it?” It is because there isn’t one. We went with the slotload drive because it is a very thin one. To date, none of the optical drive manufacturers havestepped up to offer a thin, slim line, slot load blue ray drive. That is also probably why someoneelse who has a thin slot load does not have a blue ray drive either. It is not that we are missing itor are too dumb. It is that there is not one out there. You are limited by what is available by themanufacturer.

1

1 1Anne Camden Exactly, we have been back to them and asked them to bring on. They don’t believe there is

enough demand for one to ramp up and create it.1

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Soon enough, the bet is that that the need for the slim line blu ray will just intersect with whereyou will eventually just download all your high def content.

1 2

Take the tablets. What is the Dell answer to the tablet? I guess one of the challenges iscompetition with the iPad.

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Anne Camden I am not a tablet expert. We have a dedicated group of folks that are bringing a tablet to market.We did actually announce a tablet today. It is a Latitude branded tablet. I am going to pass itaround as well. I will be the first to admit that I know very little about this product, so Iapologize in advance. I have a colleague here who can answer those questions right here. This isa purpose built tablet. We have decided that there is a market in the enterprise space for a tabletthat meets some specific needs. This is a Windows based tablet that was designed with a lot offeedback from the medical community, education community and some key small businesses.What they asked for is a Windows based tablet with the same level of security, manageabilitythat they need to deploy a system on their network that meets their very rigorous security needs.This is what we launched today to that effect. It is available on dell.com. I am going to pass itaround.

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1 2 Anit Actually, it’s true launch date will be November 1st. It is on the sneak peek area on the website.

1 1Nancy Polance I have some questions from Twitter. Some are mean. I picked two. They are asking “Why are

you selling Windows as a compulsory add on to studio series laptops?”1

1 1 Anne Camden Studio series?1

1 1 Nancy Polance I don’t know anything about it.1

1 1

Anne Camden Here is the deal. There is a population out there that use an alternate OS. They prefer Linux orsome version of Linux. We cannot sell you a system without an OS loaded on it because werequire it for testing purposes. We do offer a small, select group of systems that are actuallypreloaded with Linux on them versus Windows. It is pretty much like retail shelf space. You aregoing to put your most popular, best selling products in the most easy to find places in the retailstore. You walk in to Best Buy or the grocery store. You have all your brand name peanutbutters and the kind of niche appeal organic stuff is going to be in the back. That is a very smallshelf space item that may not be at the eye level. It may be at the bottom of the shelf. That ispretty much where our Linux systems are on dell.com. You can pick up the phone and call andwe can show you. You can order a system without Windows, but it will take extra work on yourpart.

1 2 Nancy Polance The other question I have is “Is the Inspiron z discontinued?”1

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Anne Camden Yes. It is. It was a great system for entertainment. It is great for streaming Netflix or somethinglike that. However, the technology is older and all I can say is stay tuned because we arerefreshing the road map. I am not going to say it is going to be immediate, but it is coming up.

1 1 You aren’t going to ask any mean ones?1

1 1 Nancy Polance They have words in them that should not be said in a professional setting.

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Anne Camden I understand that there is a question about battery life. I just want you to know that it has madeit’s way to me. I am going to check on it as well. Batteries, overall, have not changeddramatically for many years in the industry. There is the lithium ion. What we are seeing thoughis the ability to charge a battery more often. Batteries are consumables. When you put batteriesin a flashlight, you expect them to wear out.

1

1 2Nancy Polance The issue I have been reading from my readers is that the battery is good for about a year and

then it tapers off.1

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Anne Camden The average battery life across the industry will charge up to 100% around 300 cycles. There area lot of things that can impact your overall battery life capacity. After a year or 300 cycles, youare only going to be able to charge that battery to 80%. Again these are average numbers. Ifthese batteries are subjected to extremes as in cold or heat, that will impact the batteries. I live inTexas. I am terrified if I leave my system in the car during the day. We have over 90 days wherethe temperature inside a car was over 160 degrees. If I forgot and left my system in the car forthe weekend, I knew that I knocked 2% off my battery capacity life. They can’t maintain thatlevel of full chargeability. The same thing is true in Canada, where is will freeze. It will impactthat battery.

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1 2 David Miketinac To translate that into Canadian, that is 40+ degrees Celsius.1

1 2 Anne Camden Sorry. Yes. That is why I am LOVING the weather here personally.1

1 2

We are working with the industry. We know this is a hot point. Especially when you are workingwith systems like the XPS13z that does not have a user replaceable battery. It is in our bestinterest to put a good battery in there.

1 1Jody Arsenault Another thing someone brought up was something about having to lift the actual keyboard to

upgrade the RAM.1

1 1Anne Camden I will say that the memory is a little more accessible on the consumer system. The majority of

people do not ever open their system. Have you ever opened your system?1

1 1 Kathryn Lavallee No, but my husband would.1

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Anne Camden I have bought laptops with only 2G of memory with the intention of upgrading it and I never didit. It is a competitive marketplace. To get competitive in terms of thinness and performance, Ihave to make certain compromises if you will. One of those might be positioning of memorywhere it is not very friendly for a consumer to go in and do something, but in the end. I have avery nicely built, compact system that meets their needs in terms of thinness and portability.

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1 1 Kathryn Lavallee That is true, it is not something that everyone would do.

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Anne Camden This is the Inspiron 14z. We launched it in July. We realize that everyone wants to carry athinner and more portable laptop. Not everyone is able to pay a premium for that laptop. So thestarting point on our XPS 15z is $899. The starting point on our Inspiron 14z is $749. It is alsoaluminum clad which is nice to have as well. We did an optional backlit keyboard because itadds cost. It will be standard on the XPS product.

1 1Lior Hershkovitz Could you explain the discrepancy as to why OLM batteries are so outrageously expensive after

market. I recently had to replace one. I saw one online for $50 and Dell wants $170.1

1 1

Anne Camden I asked that same question because I had to replace one. I went and asked a battery engineer. Theengineer said that there are a lot of industry specific, safety and regulatory information. When itcomes down to it, batteries are dangerous. The engineer told me that we have no way toguarantee that a third party battery will meet this criteria. For example, does it turn off when it isfinished charging.

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1 1 Lior Hershkovitz I understand that. It is the same though. It is fine.1

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Anne Camden It is a safety issue. The engineer asked me if I have ever seen a lithium ion catch on fire? I saidno. He said you do not want to, it is like a blow torch. The most aggressive language we have onour website is that Do NOT buy a third party battery. We cannot guarantee its safety.

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David Miketinac One thing I came across in the channel. There is a market for used computer parts where peoplewill buy computers off of lease from a number of different companies. Dell being one of these.Then they will break them down for spare parts and then sell the parts by themselves. A lot oftimes. You know we talked about this life cycle of a battery after the first year, etc. The otherthing that we started seeing was that some of these third party places are selling things stampedby Dell that were being sold as Dell, but were used pieces. Think about buying a two year oldbattery. Clearly, it is going to be less expensive, but it also doesn’t have the same life as a newbattery.

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Anne Camden For me, the comfort level was worth it. I am very frugal as the next guy, but the safety andassurance was worth it to me. I hear you though, it is a painful decision to make when you canfind something significantly cheaper.

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Who is familiar with Vostro? Vostro is our small business brand. This is the third generation tothe one previous to this one was that the battery life was not good, but it was not userreplaceable. When we launched this generation, we made it user replaceable and we doubled thelife span. This is a 13.3 inch system with the full size keyboard. It weighs right at 4 pounds. Thatwill get about 6 hours of life with the extended life battery.

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The Vostro brand is for small businesses. The Inspiron is for a larger company. Is anyoneconfused by the branding? Do we have too many brands?

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1 2 Eric Vallillee You guys have separated it up pretty clearly. I have no problems.1

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Kathryn Lavallee I agree, as a consumer that doesn’t look for the small or big business solutions, I find it easy tofind what I need. I am not as familiar with some of the different brands, but it is easy for me tofind my personal needs.

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1 2 Jason Duty Does anyone comparison shop between small business and big business?1

1 2 Kathryn Lavallee I look at all of it and compare.

1 1

Anne Camden One of the key things about the laptops that I have passed around is that they are thin. They areall an inch or thinner and they are powerful in terms of “we did not compromise on thecomponents that went inside” They can all support up to 8 G of memory. They all featurestandard volt processors which are more powerful than your ultra or low volt. In the case of the15z, you have got your discreet graphics which means you really have the best in terms ofentertainment experience etc. The Inspiron 14 and the Vostro are more optimized for portabilityand battery life so they do not offer a discrete graphics option but they get this phenomenal 6hour battery life.

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The last one I am going to pass around is the one we have mentioned several times today. It isthe XPS14z. Can I borrow this for just a second? One of the things that is most impressive aboutthis is the hardest to communicate. This Vostro I have in this hand is a 13.3 inch display. Thedisplay I have in my right hand is a 14 inch display. It is not significant but it is a lot more realestate. If you stack these things on top of each other, they are identical in size. We put a 14 inchdisplay in the same size form factor as a 13.3 system and this actually took a lot of late nightsand creative thinking in terms of the engineers and designers who wanted to do that. So, how wedid it is something called a slim bezel display. Again if you look at that one feature verses theother systems going around. You will see that they all have a larger bezel. It is different fromedge to edge glass. Edge to edge can still have a bezel on it. The display on this one goes almostto the edge on this one. The other thing is, not only is that the same size as the Vostro, itmanaged to include a slim line optical drive, plus you can also get optional discrete graphics forthose people who want to do casual gaming or watch high def video without stuttering. I ampanting because am so excited over this product. If you optimize it, you will get 6 plus hours andcloser to 8. We put a lot of good things into this. We welcome your feedback on it.

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1 2 Bob Benedetti This can be a desktop replacement.1

1 2 Anne Camden Phil made a good point. How long have you been carrying yours?1

1 2 Phil Bryant Two weeks and I really like the keyboard.1

1 2 Anne Camden We made a couple of tweaks to enhance the experience.1

1 2 Bob Benedetti I like this, but it has only two USB ports.1

1 2

Anne Camden There is no real estate. I made them send me a schematic. If we take out the optical drive, we canput in 5. In the end, there is just no more room. However, I am happy to help you find a USBhub.

1

1 2 Phil Bryant One that the hardware will work through. I have an HD cam that it will not work through.1

1 2 Anne Camden There is an HD cam on that.1

1 2 Phil Bryant That is just one example.

1 1Bob Benedetti This may be a dumb question. Is it just me, but I don’t care about a big drive. I can’t remember

when I used an optical drive.1

1 1

Anne Camden How many of you have used an optical drive in the last year? How many of you would buy asystem without an optical drive (all hands raised). Well, you are advanced users as well. We takethem out and show users and let them know that they have to choose between the optical drive orthe longer battery life. More than 50 percent say that they want that optical drive. I am notsaying that they use it. Right now, from a global perspective. In China and Germany, the opticaldrives are higher in needs.

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1 1Bob Benedetti When I go to events. Years ago, they gave use paper, then they gave us a CD, now they give us a

USB key or tell us the website where we can download it.1

1 1

Anne Camden I can tell you on future products, we are going to have some pretty radical shifting away fromthe optical drive. However, you will always have the opportunity to buy one. I am going to startwrapping up. In general, how do you all feel about the product quality of Dell for the last 2-5years.

1 2 Lior Hershkovitz The one thing that I see. When you close this, there is a rattle and it does not remain shut.

1

1 2Anne Camden That is not a feature that we have sold you. Let me get your card and I will address that with

you. Let’s get together afterwards and we can take care of that.

1 1 Dave Perry What OS is on the tablet?1

1 1 Anne Camden Windows 71

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Hanif Thakor As you pass the tablet around, keep in mind, it is not an iPad. It is not a touch device. Think of itas a full functioning business PC in a tablet form. It is built to be in a network environment.With this device, you can add a corporate image that also sits on a desktop or a laptop. It is not alaptop replacement. It is a complementary product.

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Eric Vallillee I bought an iPad this year but I actually returned it because I was using it to take to class andtake notes and it turned out to be a $700 e-reader. I would like this one because it runs Windows7. I am excited about this because it is getting away from the plastic.

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1 1

Anne Camden I am glad you do. That is our goal. We want to create products that you are excited about and areproud to carry. I am not going to tell you that every system has an aluminum case. Forpersonalization, the most affordable way we can implement that is a plastic. What is interestingis that the design studio lids are super durable. They have to be to maintain the artwork.

1 2 Any other questions? Feedback?1

1 2 Bob Benedetti Littler laptops!1

1 2 Anne Camden We have something coming for you, Bob. You are going to love it.1

1 2 Bob Benedetti I have been reading about an Ultrabook.1

1 2 Anne Camden I think Intel kindly announced that we will be having an Ultrabook.

1 1 Mark Evans What has been the reaction to the XPS14 so far?1

1 1

Anne Camden The tech sites like Gizmodo love it but they say it is fat based on a picture. They are comparingit to the Air and that is a different system. That thing has an 8 cell lithium polymer battery in it.If you want only 2 hours of battery life, we can build that for you. We can build you a laptop thatis 2 pounds, but it will only give you 45 minutes of battery life.

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1 1 Mark Evans Thanks Anne for that.

1 2 David Gair We talked about notebooks. What other products would you like to see from Dell?1

1 2 GROUP: Smart phones.1

1 2David Gare You had to bring up phones... We are experimenting in the phone market and we will probably

offer something next year.1

1 2 Mark Evans Thanks Anne. There was a lot of laptop porn there. (Giggles.)11 2 So we are going to roll into a session about sustainability and recycling for the next hour.

1 1

Rebecca Wellum I am sorry. I missed today’s introductory session. I am going to talk to you today. Moreover,listen to you today about our environmental and sustainability program. Like a lot of the peopleyou have heard from Dell already. You will notice that there is a lot of tenure in the room. I amalso a lifer. I have been with Dell since 1998 and I don’t see any end in sight. Which is a greatthing because within my history with Dell, I have seen an incredible shift culturally to somethingthat is very social, environmentally responsible and more conscious. If you see what hashappened outside our industry in the last ten years. Bottled water is a huge focus, packaging,paper, the import of laptops and tablets. Just from design itself is all about being more consciousof reducing our foot print. Dell, would you be surprised to know, for the last decade has been inthis shift. So, we are now doing packaging that is completely sustainable. We are shipping ourproducts in bamboo. That is just a piece of the whole life cycle. Every part of the life cycle of aequipment on your shelves has had some influence on the environment.

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We talked about battery life, the size and drain on your systems. We talked about packaging andtransport. From a perspective of getting it in your hands and replacing it. What are you going todo with the old laptop when you are finished with it. We are regulated in 73 countries, we havetake back programs that helps you recycle and properly dispense with that equipment. Who elsedo you know that does that for free in the consumer segment. We have been doing this since2006 for free. What I am telling you is that we are active, we are leaders and we are still lookingfor what we can do better. What I am hoping to hear some feedback today. Did you know thatwe are that active in the environment? No? Can I point you to dell.com/recycling. We operatewith global policies on our take back the earth environmental disposition of equipment.Everything we use to guide our principles of take back is a global policy supported with a globalstandards with global audits. We think quite rigidly with a global sense. How does that effect ushere in Canada? Everything we have established as a cutting edge leadership role for theenvironmental space is employed and executed right here just the same as it is in Europe, Africa,the US or Japan. We are using the same standards. At the end of the day, what does that mean? Itis a lot of big words and it ultimately means that we are trying to take back the equipment we putout in the marketplace and do something responsible with it. Maximize reuse wherever we canand insure that it is being recycled and not exported to some landfill on some developingcountry. We want to make sure we are doing the right thing. Again, that starts from productdesign, product shipping and now take back. In Canada as well as other jurisdictions, we areregulated to participate in industry programs that collect so beyond what we are doing what weare on our own. We are asked to participate with our competitors and collect from the basicconsumer through collective programs. Just like your municipal garbage collection. You wouldgo to a community recycling center and drop off your old equipment for free. Our industry isobligated to go and find that mechanism and make sure it is operating smoothly. Dell sits on thetwo industry boards that help drive what that looks like. That is how we are active. You guyssaid that you weren’t that aware that we were out there doing these things and are surprisedsomewhat. I really urge you to go see that. I would like to know what we can do better so thatthe next time I saw you, it wasn’t such a surprise.

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Dave Perry That is a great motivator that you guys were that conscious for that long of a time. That needs tobe marketed a lot better than it is right now. Because I see that being a real selling point. I had noidea that Dell was green in that way.

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1 2Rebecca Wellum So let me ask you. Who did you think the greenest IT company out there was? Or did you not

think that any of us were?1

1 2 Dave Perry Not Apple!1

1 2 Rebecca Wellum I am glad to hear you say that.

1 1 Nancy Polance I hear that you make your systems PVC free as well? How long have you been doing that?1

1 1 Rebecca Wellum We were the first doing that as well. We have been doing it since 2008 in a phased in approach.

1 2Nancy Polance Do you offer some kind of recycling system besides when it becomes obsolete? When it is still

rather new so it can be upgraded?1

1 2

Rebecca Wellum Absolutely, we have trade up programs in place. Dell.com/recycling will direct you to a map. Itis a global statement as well. Wherever in the world you are, free recycling is available. InCanada, it is just a form. You fill it out and we will send the way bills for it to get shipped back.

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1 2Dick Weytze Somebody from Dell came to see me a couple of years ago with that. Unfortunately we were not

compliant with that.1

1 2

Rebecca Wellum We also partner with Goodwill. We offer consumer and corporate services for this. From theconsumer perspective it is absolutely free, easy, accessible and completely and pain free. Youfill out a form and we send you a waybill or you can take it to Goodwill if you have one nearby.

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1 2

On the corporate side we have asp recovery services which focuses on making sure we can takevolume equipment out of spaces, wipe it and recycle it or resell it. Share value, so on and soforth. If we are able to do these things, we can lower the cost of ownership for our corporatecustomers and we don’t have anything collecting dust in some basement.

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1 2 Mark Evans How many corporations follow through and use this program?1

1 2 Rebecca Wellum It is quite prevalent. Quite used.

1 1Kathryn Lavallee How much research goes into this? For example, packaging? What made you choose bamboo? It

is rapidly renewable which is great, but does it also use a lot of water?1

1 1

Rebecca Wellum I am not a packaging specialist. I can give you the name and link to the person who can give youthose details. To think about where we were when I started the box that showed up when I ordered my firstDell, it was monsterous. It was styrofoam, it was huge. It was more packaging than system. Tosee where we are now, I ordered a laptop a year ago and it came in something no bigger than abriefcase. I was amazed.

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Eric Vallillee I am just curious as to why the computer district hasn’t wrapped itself in green. Everybody isinto the environment these days. It doesn’t strike me that any electronics company has done thegreen thing. Is it the cost? It could be a competitive differentiator.

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Rebecca Wellum I think you are right. For us, having ingrained it into our culture and into our business decisions,it is second nature. We don’t take enough credit for it but that's just because it's the way welive...it would be like taking credit for making dinner. We believe it is a business differentiator.It is pretty stifling to know that no one else is offering free recycling to the consumer segment.

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Nancy Polance As a consumer, I like to see when companies give back or are doing something active in thecommunity not just providing products. Do you guys have any programs outsidecomputers/hardware? Like some printing companies will sometimes plant trees.

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Rebecca Wellum Up until this last year we have achieved 100% carbon neutrality. We have revised that so that wearen't aiming so much for carbon neutrality as we are aiming for responsibility and awareness.We manage our carbon emissions as best we can. We now have a goal of collecting 1 billionpounds of electronic waste by 2014, something we're on track to do. It is such a way of life thatthese things are second nature. I would advise you through dell.com/recycling to check thesustainability reports and see the progressions we have made. Carbon neutrality is one of them.We had a plant a tree program for a while. That has been revised. We wanted something moreeffective, engaging and cooperative. We weren't getting enough input from customers on it.

1 1 Nancy Polance How are you engaging your customers now?1

1 1Rebecca Wellum That was a point-of-sale sku. When you purchased your computer, you were asked if you wanted

to plant a tree.1

1 1 Nancy Polance I mean, like with the recycling part, how are you engaging customers to actually do it?1

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Rebecca Wellum Right. With every printer, there is a letter from Michael that points you back to the program.There are lots of ways that we can do better and that is part of why I am here to find out what wecan do better. That letter generates a lot of return business through the recycling programs.

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Shirley Freinkel I just want to ask a general question about printers. When you go to buy ink for your printer thatcosts $30 or $40. The ink is sitting next to a new printer for $50 that is completely full of ink. Ihave asked people and they have said to take the printer to the dump, but that does not seemright to replace the printer each time you need ink.

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Rebecca Wellum I cannot speak to price per se although I will take that back to my group as feedback. It is a lotlike the battery situation. There are a lot of refurbished inks out on the market and there's a lot ofchurn that way which we know degrades quality over time. There are always advancementsmade and we're always watching them.

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Kathryn Lavallee I think it's something that needs to be communicated before you buy the product because for alot of consumers it influences the purchase. They don't want to find out afterward as a bonusthat it's eco-friendly, they're buying it because it's eco-friendly.

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Kathryn Lavallee I really think it is something you should market. I remember a few years ago when things reallystarted to go eco friendly strongly across Canada. Asus issued a laptop that was encased inbamboo and they marketed it as the green laptop. Dell should have been there saying we'vealways been eco friendly, we don't have to make a bamboo laptop to show we're eco friendly.

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1 1 Nancy Polance I had no idea that Dell was so involved. It is a big market that you are missing out on.1

1 1Mark Evans You say that you don’t talk about it because it is like cooking dinner. Everyone makes dinner,

but not every computer maker is green.1

1 1 Dick Weytze It might be worth putting a message on the box.1

1 1Dave Perry If I had known that by buying Dell products, I could market that for my company. I can say that

Dell does that for me.1

1 1Kathryn Lavallee Exactly, the corporate customer looks better to its consumers as well by saying look at these eco

friendly choices we're making by going with Dell.1

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Nancy Polance To be honest, I would invest in a company that is taking those initiatives. I always have in theback of my mind, I ask myself if I have heard about them helping the environment. If morepeople knew that.

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David Gair Great feedback on blowing our own horn. We have the case studies now. A lot of companies arepositioning themselves as green. Is there some third party or way that would resonate with youguys?

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1 2Dave Perry I would say show them Dell. Use Youtube and put the videos out there. Show what you used to

do and what you currently do. The people who are earth conscious will respond.

1 1David Miketinac What advice would you give us to not be perceived as being environmentally friendly for the

sake of selling verses being environmentally friendly for the sake of being responsible?1

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Bob Benedetti What is wrong with being conscious for the sake of selling? I don’t feel any negativity towards acompany going green simply because it is a good marketing opportunity. I don’t care what thereason is, as long as they are doing it. It is the end result.

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Eric Vallillee You want people to actually know that you are actually being green rather than saying that youare. It connects back to explaining the features of the product. Saying a Dell XPS 14z uses thismuch less energy than X product (some average). If you can actually put on the packaging WHYthis is green. It is not about having green stickers on everything. Work it into the marketingitself.

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Dave Perry I say in wrapping this up. Not only showing what you have done and what you are doing to beeco friendly. Also, add some advice on how we as consumers can participate from home. Youare not only saying it because you are doing it, you are encouraging your clients and consumersto do so as well.

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Mark Graham You also want to think about how you determine consumers into advocates. If you look at themost successful eco-marketing of all time, it was the Walmart recycle bag phenomenon. Itbecomes a game. I am going to Loblaws or Walmart, using my bag, I am going to save five centsand I will be perceived as eco friendly. I don’t care if I see an ad from Dell or whatever that saysit uses 30% less but if you empower me to make a difference, I would really care about it.

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Eric Vallillee It would be great if you could come up with a big, original campaign. Like Dim your Dell day.Where everyone turns down their monitor for a day. If you could do something like that andwork Dell into it, it might catch on, build brand awareness and the green brand as well.

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Bob Benedetti Eric is on the right page with this. The plastic bag thing was purely media driven. Having spent35 years on TV I can tell you that story was simple. That is the best kind of publicity that youcan get. Simple stuff. You have an asset recovery system. You might get the media to come outand take pictures of what is being done. They will throw it back to the consumer and that kind ofstuff works. The plastic bag thing was driven by the media. I spent 4 years as a politician and themedia pushed me to start doing it within stores in my jurisdiction. Get it into the media. You arein PR. You know you have good days and bad days. You create a hum. Dell is one of the greencompanies. It is not so much about logos anymore. That is just noise now. Some good PR can bebetter than a very expensive ad campaign.

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Rebecca Wellum Would it be more important to you to hear how we recycle our products, how we build green orhow we work in the whole in a green way. We have installed solar panels in our Round Rockparking lot. We have become an organization globally that is so ingrained in it that we see it, butwe are not showing you.

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1 1Nancy Polance It is all of it! I don’t see it as tooting your own horn. You are just letting people who care about

this know.1

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Kathryn Lavallee You can even approach it in a way where you can almost talk about the fact that you haven’ttalked about it before because people can do the research and see that you have been doing it.Honesty is the best advertising. Say, we never felt the need to talk about this because it is right.

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Eric Vallillee That will really appeal to organizations who are looking to be more green too. Our university issort of militantly green. These guys had bottled water banned. They banned the use of anythingthat utilizes child labor. Carlton is a mid size university of 25,000 students but there is hundredsof thousands of students across the country and if you can get a couple of them to latch on to theidea, it is a really good starting point because students tend to care about that stuff more thanmost probably than other segments of the population. I was just saying earlier that Carlton justreplaced 5,000 of its computers in one go. If you can get the organization to say that they willchoose to replace their computers with a company who is green, it builds up PR and orders andstarts the trickle in.

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1 1 Nancy Polance Is the reason why you haven’t really shared it because you experienced criticism in the past?

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Rebecca Wellum Yes. To be very honest, we hit criticism early on through various channels who were looking atspecifically exporting of waste. The truth of the matter is that we have very rigid standards onnot exporting. We have policies that keep us really bound. So early on, we were like ooh, let’smake sure it doesn’t happen again. Then honest to God, it has just become a part of things. Idon’t think we are even consciously thinking about not tooting our own horn even. I think we doput the message out there, we are just not screaming it from the rooftops. When we have donethat, it gets clouded by all the merchandizing and branding. We have a good website. We have alot of people behind it. We have a sustainability report that goes out like clockwork. It all talksabout the things that we are doing to make sure that we continue to be sustainable andsocially/environmentally responsible. It just seems like it is on one hand I can tell you from ourexperience, yes, it is a niche market. Yes, people say that it is important. However, when itcomes to purchasing power, it doesn’t really resonate.

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1 2Nancy Polance To me, if I were to have two products that were the same and one says that it is eco-friendly, I

would rather buy that even if it costs more. But that is myself personally.1

1 2Eric Vallillee You guys are the data experts. You collect all the numbers. My guess is that it doesn’t resonate

with customers because people don’t really buy that a computer company could be green.1

1 2Dick Weytze You have to be very careful because it only takes one negative report to shoot it down. Like it

has happened with coffee. Everything says it is fair trade, then they are all over Maxwell House.

1 1 Mark Evans So Nancy, how much more would you pay for a green computer?1

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Nancy Polance I don't know, I am not a numbers person. If it suits my lifestyle and what I need to do, I will buyit. I am not going for the price, I'm going for the functionality. It has way more appeal to me if itis green. I am not 100% green, but I try to be. If more people were doing it, the bigger thedifference is. So, I would spend money.

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1 1 Mark Evans But is an eco friendly seat really more expensive?1

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Eric Vallillee But it does contribute to that brand confidence that we were talking about before. We talkedabout Mac and Apple and how they have built that higher end to get people to pay more for thesame product. It adds to that list of things that makes people feel good about Dell. Dell has greatproducts with great features, aluminum cases, they are lightweight, the service is good and ontop of that, it is green. It makes it a product that you want to go out and buy. So, it stops being anissue of “I would pay $150 more for a green laptop” and it becomes, “I would pay more forTHIS laptop”.

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1 1 Bob Benedetti He said what I wanted to say.1

1 1Mark Graham I just googled “greenest it company in the world” and IBM showed up as the greenest according

to the Newsweek green index.1

1 1 Rebecca Wellum That is good to know.

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Mark Graham I don’t know if there is any weight or depth to that. I think Dell as a hardware company has aninherent challenge. If you were going to ask a consumer quickly to decide between Dell andGoogle as to which was more environmentally friendly because it is all about the cloud andsoftware and there is nothing physical on someone’s desk. Of course, you could say that Googlehas 11 billion dollar data centers around the world. But, they have been quite proactive aboutposting how they are cooling things with sea water. They have been quite proactive in quellingsome of those concerns. I am not saying that you should go copy Google. But, it is interesting inhow they have been canny in how they have positioned themselves in being quiteenvironmentally canny. Whether that is the case or not is up for debate.

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Eric Vallillee Maybe, Steve, you can get somebody famous to endorse your green plan. Like honestly, thatstuff appeals to people. Like David Suzuki or someone. Like an actor or actress that is known forbeing green. Green, to be honest, is not my number one concern or interest. However, in terms ofmarketing I think it contributes.

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Rebecca Wellum Great feedback. Other questions? I have about 15 minutes. I can quickly talk to you about someof the things we do within our four walls. I mentioned the solar panels in Round Rock. Someonefrom Austin can confirm this. Are we off the grid in Round Rock? Yes.

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1 1 David Miketinac Explain that it is more than solar panels on the roof. Explain the set up.1

1 1 Rebecca Wellum I am not that familiar with it. I am the take back girl. I just know that we are off the grid.1

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Janet Fabri One document I can point everyone to that is pretty comprehensive. It talks about our greenstrategy and our corporate social responsibility position. It’s our CSR report. You can find iteasily on the dell.ca homepage. There are five headlines. It is one of those headlines. It will takeyou to a pretty hefty document that talks to all of our initiatives in the area:

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http://content.dell.com/ca/en/corp/d/press-releases/2011-09-06-dell-press-release-cr-canada.aspx?c=ca&l=en&s=corp

11 1 It is on your twitter screen now

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Rebecca Wellum One of the things that I did want to point to beyond this is. All of our manufacturing in Austinand Round Rock is impacted by that. Also, a large portion of our workforce in Canada has goneremote. We have reduced the footprint of our space in the Canadian office where people can sit.We have hoteling cubes where people can work when they absolutely have to come into theoffice. That is just another every day kind of thing that happens locally to reduce our footprint.We don’t do a lot of printing anymore. We don’t do a lot of traveling anymore. Everything ismonitored closely. Everything we can use. Conference calls, webcams, we are totally leveragingthat in every aspect in our business. We have also gone to global workforce. Quite literally, Imanage programs globally from my home here. That is something you would not heard of in acorporate space five to fifteen years ago. Dell is a head of the curve on a lot of that.

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Eric Vallillee It sounds like you are using a lot of your own products to become more green. Do you havesome kind of Dell green solutions to prop up other companies that want to become green? Thatseems like a good strategy.

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1 1Rebecca Wellum Again, I think this is another situation that is just ingrained into our business. We are not putting

up a headline on it.

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David Miketinac A lot of our white papers talk about the impact to the environment. A lot of our data centerstorage server offerings speak of it as well. But as she said, it is subtext and definitely not thebanner.

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Eric Vallillee Think about Samsung or the Ontario government. Right now, there is a big push in Ontario to gogreen and build up green technology and that sort of thing. I could see the Ontario governmentor an office in the government saying “we are partnering with Dell to reduce our carbonfootprint by doing all the things that they have been doing”

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1 1 Dick Weytze Producing calendars to motivate.

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Rebecca Wellum Right. Right. A few years back we were in a very vocal push to be the greenest IT company inthe world. That produced some engagement, but we have not sustained it in terms ofcommunication. Anything else? That is awesome feedback. I don’t necessarily want to wrap upearly, but I will be here if you have any questions.

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Mark Evans I don’t think anyone is going to mind if we take a few extra minutes for the break. We are backhere at 4:00 for the social media discussion. I see that there are some snacks in the back, but theydon’t look diet friendly.

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Mark Evans OK, I think we are going to get started. Everyone find your seats. It is pretty common knowledgethat Dell has embraced social media in a very successful and active way. Rather than provide anoverview of what Dell is doing, I think what we want to do is talk about best practices so Dellcan get some insight into what is happening out there. Who is doing social media well and howwe like to engage and communicate with brands in social media. Some of the things that workand some that don’t work. So maybe I could call on Mark Graham. So with promotionalmerchandise, is probably one of those companies that is using social media from a professionalbasis. Mark has a very strong brand on social media. Mark can talk to us about how much workit takes and how you measure success.

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Mark Graham Those are a lot of questions. I will try to be brief and keep it under 5 hours. I think as a quicksnapshot, the thing that is unique about our approach is that promotional products is a very oldschool, mature, commoditized somewhat unprofessional industry that has been around for a longtime. I have always been interested in technology’s ability to transform a company and make itstand out in a mature industry. Social media and technology are so entwined that I glommed onto social media a few years ago as a great platform to do a couple of things. Number one,establish thought leadership for the organization and use that as a tool to differentiate. Numbertwo, interact and have honest conversations with what I would define as “fans” and clients of thecompany. We would have the conversations of look what we are doing well and also what weare not doing well. That, I have found, is really unique because when I started the business in theyear 2000, the first 6 years did not have that opportunity to engage in real time, honestconversation with your customers. Since 2006, it has completely changed how we go to marketand interact with people.

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1 2 Mark Evans The second question was resources. For a lot, businesses that is a key consideration.1

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Mark Graham We spent a lot of time on social media. Be it our blog, shooting Youtube videos. We spend a lotof time on our Twitter feed and Facebook. If was to give a percentage of time that we spend on aweekly basis, probably thirty percent of our time is invested in social media. I have given severalpresentations about our approach. I have people put up their hand and say “Thirty percent ofyour time? Are you crazy? You should be meeting your customers.” What I always say is thatwe have noticed almost a 30 percent drop in face to face interaction with customers becausethose customers don’t have time for us anymore. They have time virtually, but they don’t wantto get up and go to a meeting room for an hour to talk about a promotional merchandise strategy.They can see it online, watch youtube videos, chat, email whatever the case may be. It is almostallowed us to direct resources away from an inefficient way of marketing to a more efficient wayof marketing so that is my smart answer to them. The critics, maybe they are still grumblingunder their breath thinking we waste time on social media, but it works.

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In terms of ROI in social media, I have a love hate relationship with the word ROI in socialmedia. On one hand I think it sucks the life out of social media. Social media is fun. It is great tointeract with members of our community and for me to then sit and try to put an ROI configureagainst that, I think is challenging. At the same time, I am the owner of a company and I want tomake sure that any marketing efforts that I engage in are not a waste of time. My quick answerto that would be “If we look at the number of times our tweets are re-tweeted or the number oftimes we are mentioned. Whether they are fans or clients. For instance, we do business with oneparticular customer that has 35,000 followers and regularly mentions what a good job we dowhen we ship product to her. That is not bad for business because we will have people come inand say “Hey, I saw so and so speaking about you, we would love to work with you and by theway, price is not as much of an issue because it comes through a good work of mouth referral”.

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This thirty percent of time has established us as a thought leader in our industry. Our sales are up40% from last year. I attribute some of that to our growth in social media.

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Mark Evans So Casey, why don’t you talk a little bit to the people about what you do in terms of socialmedia. Maybe just talk about the campaigns you get involved with in leveraging social mediaand best practices.

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Casie Stewart Hi everyone. I am Casie. I wasn’t here this morning so I don’t know if everyone did an intro butI am just going to tell you a little about what I do. I am a lifestyle blogger. I do a lot of hostingevents, brand partnerships and stuff that is all around social media. My daily blog is aboutlifestyle about all kinds of things that I do. Things that are fun. It is casiestewart.com if youwould like to check it out. Some of the things that I have done in the last couple of years... socialmedia is a big thing for me. I kind of got into it early, like 2008, which isn’t that long ago but itis for that realm of things. I used to run the social media for Much Music and MTV, Canada it’sCTV. I did lots of cool stuff there. Some of the things I do now are partnerships with companies.I've done a big campaign with Puma Social. They have a whole line of business in a globalcampaign that they did. It is called the “after hours athlete”. We are celebrating 5 am cab ridesand 5 am trips to the gym. Sometimes, victory is making last call. Those type of things. That wasa campaign that was fully integrated with social and it is global. That goes with the Puma Socialhashtag. We have a really cool party. People sign up. It is talked about across social media.There is a Foursquare check in. There is badges you can get for using Foursquare. That is onekind of thing they did was really celebrating that kind of niche in the lifestyle. It is maybe notyour typical Puma sports brand.

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Something else I did earlier this year was Pepsi Throwback. It is the original Pepsi that uses realsugar instead of fake sugar so they asked me if I would be interested on working on thecampaign. They knew I was kind of into retro. So we had a hatch take that we established forthat. In doing that we wanted the client to get somewhere around 2-4 million impressions byworking with me. Depending on your social campaign, you might have different goals.Sometimes it is brand awareness. Sometimes it is growing your Twitter followers. Sometimes itis getting people to like us on Facebook. Wherever that is. For that one specifically, it was just toget people talking about the Pepsi throwback. Something I thought was cool to me was. When Idrank that Pepsi, it reminded me of when I was a kid. Taste gives you that feeling and peopletalked about it. We had the foursquare check in. Everyone was using the hatchtake. It was a twohour event at revival with is an event space downtown and within one hour, we were trending inToronto and in two hours, we were trending across Canada. So they were really pleased. Theysaid, this is awesome, working with you is great.

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I am growing my Twitter following very organically. I am not using teen followback. If youdon’t know what that is, don’t even look into that. I tweet sometimes a hundred times a day. Ifyou don’t follow many people, I can get really annoying because I tweet a lot. However, I loveit. I do a lot of interaction with people. I pretty much reply to everyone who interacts with me.As a brand, me being a personal brand or you as a company brand, really engaging with thosepeople and building relationships is really important. When I did this event, it wasn’t just aboutthe Pepsi and the free drinks. People wanted to come because they could hang out with mebecause the reputation that I have built for my brand is fun or energetic. They have thatrelationship with me whether in real life or on line. What is really great about Twitter is that youare always selling something. Social media is such an awesome tool to build a relationship withyour customers. It is not based on “Are you going to buy my computer right now”. You build arelationship, so you are at the top of their mind when they go to buy a computer they might think“Oooh. I have to get a new computer. You know that guy from Dell was so funny”. I am not aRogers customer any more but I will talk with some people at Rogers like RogersRob who Iknow will complain about some device. I will still ask and get an answer. If someone comes tome with something, I can say, tweet my friend RogersRob, he will help you. It is not about mebeing a customer. It is about them creating a relationship with me.

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Mark Evans Let me ask you about the creative angle to social media. Most companies now have a Facebookpage, a Twitter feed and a blog. That is table stakes. So that first mover vanishes and disappears,so now the differentiation game has changed. How do you see brands trying to separatethemselves from the crowd?

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Casie Stewart Be creative. There are lots of things. You used to be able to do a Facebook contest, but you can’tdo that anymore because Facebook changed their rules and regs. You have to use an externalapp. However, there are tools that can make your Facebook more exciting. That is one of thechallenges I found working for much and MTV. I would be updating the Facebook page forMuch, MTV and much more on the same day around the same time about maybe the same thing,but you had to say it in three different voices. Try that. It is hard. You just maybe like to kindafind maybe a look I guess Much is a really good resource if you look as successful campaigns.Take a look at something someone else has done. Like when they roll out the new timeline, thebrand pages are going to almost look like a blog. Twitter and Facebook can have a like taggingcontest. People like to do something that is fun. People love free stuff so if you want to get topeople, send free stuff in the mail. They love that. Even if you are sending something to people,that is a good way to get people to engage in Facebook. Ask questions, show them that you areinterested in them. Use pictures. Don’t write too much text.

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Mark Evans There are mommy bloggers over here that I have been picking their brains because I have beenfascinated in how well they have done in such a short period of time. Jody, you mentioned thatyou get approached by a lot of brands. How do brands engage you on social media? How do youlike to be engaged and how have you been disappointed?

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Jody Arsenault I get lots of emails from brands who want to partner with me doing reviews and giveaways andsuch. I am a blogger who does that two days a week. I don’t do it more because I have othercontent that I want to put up. I can’t say yes to everyone. So, I decide what my readers want.When approaching me, did the company take the time to find out my name or is it “Dearmommy blogger”. If you are getting hundreds of emails a day, you have to come up with astrategy because you don’t have time to read them all. If they have already tried to make thatrelationship, it will make me want to work with them more.

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1 1 Mark Evans Do you get a lot of friends who try to engage you on social media?1

1 1Jody Arsenault Yes and I love that. It is real. It is not just every single tweet about their company or brand. They

are trying to find out about me, my readers and other people in this.

1 2 Mark Evans So Kathryn, you probably get approached a lot too.1

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Kathryn Lavallee It is nice to get personality in the approach you get. The more, the better. I have gotten emailsfrom companies where the person who sends the email will say “This is what we do. This is ourproduct. I thought you would be especially interested in it because of your son Benjamin. I knowthat he is right at the age where he would be doing this. It shows that they have taken the time toread up on my family and my kids ages. Those things show that they have done research and areconnecting with me and not just a mommy blogger. It is easy to connect with a mommy blogger.There are lots of us. Connecting with the actual person behind the blog is a little bit different.

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1 2Mark Evans So, what are you looking for in brands in terms of the content they create and the things they do

in terms of social media?1

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Kathryn Lavallee It depends on the campaign. Like Jody, I do the review and give away things. That is kind of likea bonus for both parties especially where the giveaways are concerned because it brings us newreaders. It brings people to the website because they want to win the prize and it is great for thebrand because they are the ones who are giving away the prize. That is one of the things that canbe beneficial to both parties. It still really amazes me to a degree how many public relationsplaces and how many brands will come and expect mom bloggers to work for free. I find itflabbergasting. They often don’t recognize us as businesses. I don’t have an editor who is payingme to write stuff on the site. I am the editor. Just like if I was writing for the magazine, I wouldbe paid by the editor. I have to get some type of payment for making this post. That is just kindof one of the facts of like. It is different if we are doing a giveaway situation because that isbeneficial for both. The amount of emails from brands that expect us to take their press releaseand just post it for nothing on our very large audience sites is astounding.

1 1Mark Evans So Nancy, what do you think the brands are expecting from you? What are they looking for?

What realistically could they get in return?1

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Nancy Polance I would say the biggest thing about mommy bloggers is the trust. I have had people say “Mychild was sick and I went to the blog and got the information I needed”. The trust that thebloggers build with their readers and followers is what benefits the company. Women andmommies in general tend to analyze things more when the make decisions. Usually, they are thedecision makers at home especially for brands and buying. When it comes to big purchases, it isusually the women in the home that make the decision. It is the trust we provide.

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Kathryn Lavallee A fellow blogger named Jen told me that what we bring is another connection to the product.This is very much where our reviews is concerned. If we reviewed something and one of myreaders go out and buy it, they know that they can come to me by email or chat and they knowthat I have some kind of answer for them. Even if it is something about durability 6 monthsdown the road. I had a reader said, I read your review and it is has been 8 months. I would reallylike to know how the product is holding up for you. We are accessible.

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Jody Arsenault I find that working with bigger companies, I try to make a package that suits their needs. It mightnot just be a review and giveaway. It might be a package where we do a Twitter party together,they will advertise and I will post on Facebook. I will make it an all around campaign to suit thebusinesses need. A Twitter party can give 3 million impressions in an hour. But then a weeklater, they can come to the blog and see the review and the ad is up so it is continuous over aperiod of time and not just one specific thing.

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Mark Evans Companies that are doing well from an engage point of view? Does anyone come to mind? Jodysaid that she tweeted that she had lost her iphone and Rogers responded and got her a pre launchiPhone delivered to her house.

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Jody Arsenault I have had people say that it is just because you have so many followers and that is true but youhave to meet customers where they are at. So, it doesn’t matter how many followers I have, I ama customer just like anyone else. If they know that I am on Twitter and I am expressingsomething that I am going through in my life and if they can get in touch with me via Twitterand connect with me in a real way and not a 1-800 number because that is not what I use.

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Kathryn Lavallee I think it is a really powerful tool for companies to be using Twitter especially for buildingrelationships. When I work with products and brands, I want a lasting relationship. It is usuallybrands that you trust and believe in. That is why I think Twitter is so important. We talk tobrands. We talk about our kids. It is real relationships that you are creating and that is the benefitof giving the information instantly and giving information that you want to give out other thansome lengthy thing.

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Jody Arsenault With Rogers running around earlier, some people say that they may not be the best. However,because we have a relationship, I was able to say “no, they are great at this”. It bridges the gapand brings us together.

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Nancy Polance I am going to mention another blogger. Jen from Mom has a voice. She was telling me that oneof her friend’s daughter worked at Victoria Secret. She was fairly young. She was going home atnight and the parking lot was dark and dangerous. She got approached by a car with a strangeman in it. I guess she came home and told her mom and the mom was very upset about it. So shetweeted Victoria Secret and said “you have young girls working late hours and they are walkingto their cars by themselves at night and it is dangerous”. They tweeted her back and they broughther up high in the company and now all over, Victoria Secret now walks their employees to theircars just from one tweet. One tweet can change the way an entire company can do business.

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Mark Evans So Jason, One of the things I wanted to ask you in terms of Dell customer service and socialmedia. Just the difference between business and consumers. So you are talking to Jody forexample on business to business. How does Dell approach that?

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Jason Duty I think the approach in general is the same. It is very much about listening. It is about connectingdirectly to customers and building relationships. It is about engagement and sharing beyond whatthe immediate business seat is. It shows that you are human and those types of personal thing. Ithink about being a seed where my team is listening for those consumers and businesses thatexpress the need for support from Dell. We actually look at folks that have a lot of followers. Wedon’t give them a lot of preferential treatment. We also look at folks that don't have manyfollowers at all. Maybe they just started a Twitter account just to tweet us and tell us their issue.A complaint is a gift so we treat all those equally in terms of understanding customer needs andaddressing those. Clearly the more influential people that you tweet to opens up that network ofpeople that see that interaction. I think that the dynamic with B2B is a lot the same. I wouldargue though that the circle of platforms that communities that businesses participate in are alittle different than where consumers might participate in. Thinking about IT buyers and partnersfor example, there are some very distinct communities that those people participate in. So, Ithink that somewhat narrows the universe of places that a business needs to go to connect withpeople. I think that is a very general statement and clearly businesses talk in Twitter andFacebook.

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1 1 Mark Evans Are their needs different? Are they looking for relationship and community building?1

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Jason Duty The dynamics are similar. The topics of conversation are different. The needs of a business aredifferent than the needs of a consumer. The needs for engagement are similar though in thatrespect.

1 2 Mark Evans Does anyone else have any other examples that they would like to share?1

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Mark Graham I had a funny story with West Jet. It is similar to the story about Rogers. I had an issue wherethey canceled a flight and I had to rebook on another flight and it ended up costing me $1,000out of pocket. I asked to talk to customer service and then a manger and it went nowhere. Then Itweeted about it with this tweet “My flight was canceled on West Jet. I was out of pocket $1,000because Owners Care?”. It was amazing because I had quite a lack luster customer serviceexperience over the phone. Within 6 hours, I had a tweet in return stating that they were sorry Ihad the problem and to please email west jet at a certain address for more information. I emailedand received a call from the Twitter customer service manager who ultimately gave me a creditfor $1,000 for a flight over the next 12 months. I was blown away by that. I thought he was justgoing to apologize. That was amazing. But what was even funnier is that I got a call from theTwitter manager asking if I would like to go to a conference about resolving customer serviceissues via Twitter. I got up and met this guy and said I was complaining about you but now I amspeaking at a conference. I was thinking about it after the fact. I thought that it was great thatWest Jet took care of me because I use Twitter, but it is a shame that their customer service isnot consistent. What I encourage my colleague is that we should respond to all forms ofcommunication that way. In an 18-20 employee organization we have more control. I understandthat with a company like West Jet the challenges are greater. It is a challenge for modern daypartners to make sure that the Twitter geeks don’t get the priority over the less tech savvycustomer.

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Mark Evans Do you think that the expectations from people on social media to get a positive response are skyhigh. People expect brands to bend over backwards every time you complain that my hard drivefailed or my headphone jack isn’t working. It is almost a vicious cycle if you think about it.

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Mark Graham Yes. We had a small kink on our ecommerce code this morning and there was a Tweet that camein at 10:30. I just happened to pick it up and respond 7 minutes later to say sorry about this and Iput them in touch with the developer in charge and he ultimately got a result and was veryhappy. That was within 10 minutes of a Tweet and he wanted to place an order. That was alldone publicly. We took more of the lengthy exchanges offline. It is interesting how you can usethese channels to find problems in your process. I think if it had been two hours, this guy wouldhave been tweeting that we are the worst promotional products company ever.

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Stuart R. Crawford That is the problem with the online par for business right now is how often we respond to theboy crying wolf? When do you know what is a real legitimate issue? It goes against myfundamental principles of give praise publicly but give negative feedback privately. I think forme I use social media as a PR and communication tool. It is woven into my very own fabric ofcommunications. I don’t see it where I play. I don’t see it the way other people do. Who caresabout an IT company selling services to small businesses? Nobody cares. Not one of my clientsever got any business directly that is measureable. Now, thought leadership is a different role alltogether. Business is still done with people. People first, Company second, Product third. I havea fundamental challenge bending over backwards to everybody looking for attention becausetheir flight was 10 minutes late. I have publically complained on my own private Facebook pagethat I will never use Delta airlines again because I have lost 5 connections in the last 6 flights.

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Jody Arsenault I have an example of that. Because I know I have a larger following. I am very careful aboutwhat I say. I know I work with brands and I want to have a good relationship with them. Onecompany I worked with did not follow through on the giveaway and I had to tell my winner thatI was sorry because the company did not follow through and I am ultimately non responsible so Ijust put a tweet out saying that “I am really disappointed that a company didn’t follow throughwith their giveaway”. I did not say the actual company name. Within two minutes, I got aresponse from Otterbox saying that they will be happy to let that winner pick anything off theirsite so they can make it right. So, they stepped in and I wrote a big blog post how greatcompanies step in when other companies are not so great. I never had to actually mention acompany name.

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Kathryn Lavallee I see a lot of these tweets and I certainly hope that they don’t get a reaction from the companies.You see a lot of where people go on and say “This company sucks or is awful”. If you have aconstructive response to make, that should get a response. It shouldn’t get a better response thanother forms choose to use.

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Stuart R. Crawford We had deliverable issues earlier this year and a few loud mouths in the channel started bloggingabout things. They wrote Websicle Lied to US. To me that was a character assassination of acharacter assassination. Our CEO said that if you elect to pay attention to that loud mouth, youwill take away from the other 16,000 clients we do great work for because of a few loud mouthslooking for attention. Eventually, those guys went away. The problem is google search. There issome definite play there. Now once somebody goes and searches our company name, that crapcomes in below it. How do we get rid of that when just a few loud mouths wanted attention.

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Dave Perry That is something that happened to me when I had a gaming blog. If you have built a followingwithin social media and Twitter, you have followers. Amongst those peoples are champions.They get your brand and even if you don’t respond as a company, they will respond for you.

1 1Mark Evans One more question before we wrap up. What are you looking for from Dell? Are you getting

what you want? Do you want to see something different happen?1

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Kathryn Lavallee I would say that it can’t just be about customer service. If you want to have something that last.You can’t just use social media for customer service. It is a great tool, but the engagement is sobig that you have to have that one on one engagement as well. Otherwise, when a new form ofmedia comes about, Twitter and Facebook will be useless.

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Casie Stewart Maybe we do the campaign that says “Let’s invite the bloggers” and I get an email two weekslater with in invitation. Why not be friends with the bloggers all the time and read their blogs allthe time? So, I get another PR email and I forward it to my assistant and she reads it and decidesif I should read it or not. It is like build a relationship so then they get an email from me and Dellhas a question that says “What do you think about this?” Just like you would ask someone whois your friend about something. Build a real relationship. How about, I see you went on that tripto Florida, girl you look great!

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1 1Nancy Polance Brands come to my blog and leave a comment on my post on what I have written and tweet back

and forth. It is actually a real relationship.1

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Casie Stewart It takes time, but you will have a long term relationship with them. I am not looking for a onenight stand with my friends. You see each other a couple of times. You check in and see howyou are doing. It is important and it makes you feel good. You feel good about your brand andthey care about your brand.

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1 1Kathryn Lavallee It is not any different than how you would build up a relationship with any other media

professional. If you were going to the papers, you have those couple of relationships.

1 1Mark Evans We are 15 minutes away. So we are going to go around the room with two things. What are you

going to take away from this even and what would you like Dell to do?1

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Dick Weytze Well. Let’s see. My eyes have opened up quite a bit. I was working a small empire. To heareverything that is going on is fascinating. What I have seen from Dell is amazing compared towhat I have been doing. What I will be doing in the future is analyze everything I have seen hereand go through Twitter and messages.

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1 1 Shirley Freinkel I am just a bit overwhelmed by it all because I didn’t know. Everything that has been going on

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Dave Perry I am gladly impressed with how Dell values the feedback of their actual users. Long term or newcustomers. I am glad that you shared with us new products and the green efforts. Hopefully, ifwe get invited back next year we will see some of the things we have said here today. I wouldlike to see the message of environmental sustainability get out. I would like to see that a lotmore. You are going through the right steps and getting the right feedback.

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Lior Hershkovitz Pretty much what Dave said. I think that it is commendable that a big company like Dell isengaging people the way they have. It is amazing to see the impact of social media over the last5 years. The role that it plays. The size of team that you need to manage it. I think from what I’ve heard today will certainly set in motion the right ideas as far as dealing directly with theircustomer. I will look forward to checking it out over the coming years and see how it is comingalong.

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Mark Graham Two things. Number one, be friends with bloggers. Number two, it is interesting to see acompany as massive as Dell going through what I think is a pretty interesting time in its history.I really get the sense that this is a company that is really committed to almost reinventing itselfin trying to remaining ahead of the curve and be really relevant to it’s customers consumer orenterprise. I can’t imagine that this is an easy task. Being invited to events like this is an honor toget to play a role in making a difference. There are a lot of other big companies out there thatdon’t do that kind of a job like that and they ultimately slide into irrelevance.

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Stuart R. Crawford The end of the day, business is still done with people and the relationships that people form.Nothing has changed since my grandfather taught me that 40 or 50 years ago. The tools that weuse to communicate and share knowledge have changed, but the core fundamental message isstill there. I don’t care if it is a telephone, email, fax, Twitter. I just sent a Twitter message outsaying that Dell CAP is almost over, I can turn off Twitter for the next month until the next ITconference I go to. Whatever tools people use is how they want to be communicated to. Befaithful to the channel. The IT consulting community carries a lot of weight in small andmedium business market. Keep them as your friends. It will help.

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Casie Stewart I think that what I have really learned is that I learned a lot about Dell. I haven’t participated insomething like this before. It is really neat to see that you really care and you are really takingthe time to take a whole day to bring us together like this. The visuals and so forth help me. If Ican share some of the things that I have learned from the blogger side or just PR kind of things.If that can help make Dell’s customer service better in the way they do things better social. Ithink that is totally awesome.

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Jody Arsenault I echo what you say. I am very thankful that I was invited to the event. I have attended a fewevents like this and I am happy to say that this one was put together really well. I like theopportunities that we have all had to share and discuss together. I am excited for some of thethings you are doing. I am surprised at some of the things I have heard. I am glad to bring thisback to my readers and share what you guys are doing. So. Thank you. As far as what I wantDell to do, I look forward to interacting more on social media with you so we will see how thatgoes and I think the whole green initiative is good. Don’t be afraid of what people are going tothink. I still think it is great to get that message out there. There are so many people that need tohear that because I had no idea about the wonderful things that are being done.

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Kathryn Lavallee I loved the two way communication through the entire event. It is what I was really hoping for.So much of it was really wonderful. To be able to learn and contribute is one of the greatestthings in the world. What do I want Dell to do? Let’s continue the conversation! Let’s keeptalking. It is so easy to talk nowadays. It is great to do a face to face because you get thatconnection, but after that when you are online with someone you can hear that voice even as youare reading because you have had that face to face connection. So, let’s keep it going and spreadthe word about some of these amazing things that Dell is doing. Let’s continue the conversationand share this with as many people as possible

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Eric Vallillee I think one of the things that I took away is that obviously all the people who are here really careabout the company and the brand. You really believe in it. I think that is really good. It is reallyimportant. Jason was talking this morning about the programs that they have in place to dealwith customer service to get those values to trickle down. I really hope that stuff continues and Ihope that you sort of make that your front line. People who are answering the phones are aspassionate as you are about the products they are selling and support.

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Joe Mallon What do I want? Do you have a 16 core… No really, first of all I was very surprised to be askedto join in considering that I am just a consumer and not associated with computing. I have neverbeen to a function like this. It has been an eye opener to know that some companies really docare. If you found that I am quite today, it is because I just bought a new Dell machine and I amvery pleased with it.

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Bob Benedetti I was happy to be invited to this. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I have been to events like thisbefore that turned out to be marketing events. I am pleasantly surprised that this is not what thisis. I really feel that you guys were listening to us and writing down what we think needs to bedone. I thank you for the opportunity to pass along whatever wisdom we have been able to moveacross the table. I have a new appreciation of Dell. I have always been a fan of the company butit has been a very worthwhile event for me. I enjoyed it. I hope we will get the chance to get thisagain. I want a small laptop that will blow me away.

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Mike Agerbo I am a tech journal enthusiast. I wanted to come here today inspired. I wanted to see what thedirection was for Dell. I wanted to meet some of the people to see their character and see howthey are driving things. I wanted to see the new products and I have been wowed. There are sofew tech companies in the tech marketplace that I feel are leading the charge. I think Dell cancontinue to be that company. I have had the chance to talk to some of the Dell folks individually.You guys are actually pretty cool. What is common among all of you is that you really believe inwhat you are doing and you have a clear vision on what needs to be done going forward. That tome is very inspiring as a tech journalist and a small business owner as well. We use a lot of Dellproducts in my company. As a small business owner, it makes me feel comfortable that I amwith the right company.

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Nancy Polance I just want to say thank you for having us here. I appreciate that. What I am taking away is that Iwas pretty active with the whole green thing. That is something that is really big especially as aconsumer. I think it would benefit Dell. It is such a big demographic. I am just grateful to behere to learn more about Dell. It has been a while since I purchased a Dell product. It has blownme away how much it has changed. To find out that you guys have been green for quite a whileis a big thing for me. Most of you guys have voiced the passion that you have. All the Dellemployees here... it is nice to see that and talk to a brand directly about their products and talkabout how they want to improve. I say continue with the social media and building relationships.I would say toot your horn about the green thing. Thank you very much.

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Phil Bryant I really do appreciate you guys coming in. Thanks for all the feedback. Just so you know, mypersonal opinion on the whole social phenomenon is that if I really want to know what is goingon, I ask in three places. If I get the same answers in the different places, then I see that is howthings are. If I get three different answers, I know we have a problem.

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I can do surveys and while they are great data. The problem is that it takes time to take thatinformation back. What I love about the social feedback is that it is completely unfiltered and itis immediate. I can take a small problem or issue and intercept it before it gets to be a bigproblem or a big issue. I really do appreciate you coming here and I appreciate all the feedback.When we do surveys, what I hate are the fence sitters. The people who didn’t care enough to rateyou enough one way or another. That is the worst place to be. What I like about this is that if youlike something, you say it and if you don’t like it you say it, and it is very clear. I don’t have toguess at all and I know I have gotten the problem now. I know I have gotten the praise as soon asI could. That is the way it should be. You provide a valuable service for us. I love the idea ofbeing able to maintain a relationship more. I think that was frankly well said. I think the notionof being too opportunistic and self serving is very good feedback. I get this feedback at home. Ireally do appreciate you caring enough to come here and take the time.

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Janet Fabri First of all I really appreciate the commitment that everyone took the time to come and be heretoday. Many of you came from locations outide of Toronto, many from cities quite far away soeveryone made a big effort to get here on relatively short notice. I really appreciate that. I wantto thank my colleagues in the room who brought this to fruition. There has been a team in placesince March of this year making sure that this was the kind of day that delivered the kind ofmessages you needed to hear and more importantly that we needed to hear. We are going to do asurvey as a followup and in that survey we would like for you to tell us what went well and whatdid not go well. Tell us how you would like to continue communicating with us and with whatfrequency and what kinds of things would you like to do with so that this is not an isolated eventand so that we are forging the beginnings of some new relationships and we take that veryseriously. The reception will be on the main floor in the vault.