Microsoft Elevates Dell Computer Corporation to Gold Partner for Support Services

Dell Computer Corporation
Published September 2003

Dell Computer Corporation is a premier provider of products and services required for customers worldwide to build their information-technology and Internet infrastructures. Dell, through its direct business model, designs, manufactures and customizes products and services to customer requirements, and offers an extensive selection of software and peripherals. The EMEA Expert Centre is situated in Cherrywood, South of Dublin. This consists of over 100 of multi-lingual system consultants that provide high-level enterprise support for complex data centres, clustered, large storage and rack dense enterprise environments.

Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for support services consists of partners who have made it an essential part of their company's business to provide the industry's best support for Microsoft products. Perspective Gold Certified Partners have to meet stringent qualification requirements.

Background

Dell Computer Corporation and Microsoft® have always worked closely together having benefited mutually generating strong growth for their respective products and services. Dell's EMEA Expert Center was mainly established to provide Premier Enterprise Support Services for bronze, silver and gold customers. This is a very high growth area for Dell with turnover doubling every quarter. As Dell's business in the mission critical area continues to expand and their customers dependence of information technology continues to grow and increase in complexity the company has had to grow its support services.

Dell's EMEA service center handles three million technical support calls and 500,000 email support requests per annum for 9.8 million systems currently under warranty. The average queue time for enterprise customers is 35 seconds and 95% of four-hour calls are resolved on time the first time. Customer satisfaction for Gold service customers is running at 5.5 out of 6.0. Dell has won many awards in recognition of its service record and is well ahead of its competitors for problem resolution.

Solution: Support infrastructure and Microsoft Gold Partner Certification

Dell Computer Corporation has continually bucked the recent IT trends by improving its market penetration and growing its turnover. Market share figures for both desktop and server computers are ahead of all competitors and the company has diversified its product range to include storage devices, printers and to extend its services portfolio. The company's growth target over the next four years is to double its turnover. Some of this increase will come from a greatly enlarged services area.

The Expert Center established at Cherrywood just south of Dublin is focused on providing support across Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Enterprise support is available to all customers that have signed up to one of Dell's support schemes that are classified into Bronze, Silver and Gold. The company has invested heavily in this proactive support center to ensure that customers receive the best possible levels of support.

Although Dell had already invested in a state-of-the-art support center, the company had to meet a large number of stringent conditions before it could quality for Microsoft's Gold Partner Certification. Apart from customer references Dell had to demonstrate that it had the appropriate number of qualified MSCEs, the required infrastructure in place and be capable of providing a 24 x 7 service.

Dell had to demonstrate that service support was an integral part of the company's support services business. A Gold Certificate for Support Services requires a minimum number of Microsoft Certified Professionals and approximately fifty per cent must have a MSCE or MSCD credential. The quality of service has to be monitored on an on-going basis backed by quarterly independently conducted customer satisfaction surveys. Dell had to demonstrate expertise in delivering second and/or third level technical support for business systems products including infrastructure, database, messaging and desktop productivity.

Dell has and continues to invest heavily in training both internally and externally. The average training period per employee is five to six weeks every year. The company has to employ an additional ten per cent employees just to cover the time that has to be given over to training. The skill sets required by support personnel is not confined to technical qualifications or customer-handling skills, as multilingual skills is a key requirement.

Benefits: Matching Strategy and Credibility

As companies strive to extract better value from investments in IT, services become a more important component in the IT infrastructure. The appointment of Dell as a Gold Partner for Support Services lends credibility to Dell's strategy to excel in the services and support areas. This is the fastest growing area for Dell and it is very important for the company to be recognized for its excellence in this area.

Lower costs – Business process improvement
Dell introduced a business process improvement scheme in early 2000 that is aimed at improving productivity, eliminating unnecessary activities thereby reducing costs. Improving skill sets and achieving recognition for this has helped the company to reduce costs and enhance the opportunities to generate additional revenue streams.

Faster response enhances customer satisfaction
Higher skill sets help to reduce the time required to resolve customers' problems. This is a win-win situation with Dell support staff being more productive and customers benefiting from faster problem resolution.

Better quality problem resolution
Higher skill sets help to ensure that problems are correctly resolved without the need for repeated calls that cause customer frustration and reduce support personnel productivity.

Escalation to Microsoft support
Problems that cannot be totally resolved within the Dell support center can be escalated automatically to Microsoft in a way that minimizes customer intervention.

Summary

There were many synergies made available as a result of deploying Microsoft's .NET platform. Existing back-end systems that had been written using the .NET platform were easily integrated into the new system in a minimum of time. The deployment of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET enabled the construction of a user interface that is easy and quick to tailor to the requirements of individual partners.