Dell To Customers: Complaints? What Complaints?

Let’s just pretend that you’re the world’s largest computer manufacturer and that you’ve been having issues both with quality and customer service. You’ve made many people mad (including some high-profile bloggers) and they have taken to expressing their dismay and outrage on your customer support fora. Do you:

1. Take the concerns to heart and endeavor to fix both your manufacturing and customer service organizations, albeit in a quiet fashion, thus allowing your products to speak for themselves.
2. Take the actions from step 1 as well as undertaking a massive PR blitz to assure your loyal customers and potential buyers that you are aware of the issues and are looking to address them.
3. Place your heads in the metaphorical sand and attempt to ride out the bad publicity and just hope everything works out all right in the end.
4. Aggresively pursue your detractors and take the unilateral step of removing the fora in question and permanently deleting your customers’ complaints in order to try to minimize the damage to your reputation while simultaneously refusing to address the root causes of the complaints.

What would you do, if faced with that choice? What would the world’s largest PC manufacturer do?
Well, wonder no more – Dell took step 4. Hooray for Dell!