Earn loyalty from customers by learning their technology needs and giving them what they want
Submitted by Drew Moore on
By Drew Moore, Executive Director and General Manager, Dell Rugged Mobility Products
Our customers depend on Dell Rugged Solutions to deliver the elite computing performance they require to complete mission critical tasks in harsh work environments. If our technology fails, they fail. Our products need to be just as dependable as the customers we serve: be they military, first responders, service officers or adventurers.
Those same high stakes also present us with a phenomenal opportunity to develop loyalty and long-standing relationships with customers as we work together to improve Dell Rugged Solutions with every new generation. We are counting on each other.
Karen Catchpole, a renowned adventurer and journalist behind the TransAmericas Journey, is a unique long-term customer who has kept coming back due to the positive experiences she’s had with our notebooks and the improvements she’s seen between product generations .
Since 2006, Karen and photographer Eric Mohl have been on a cross-continent road trip of the Americas—from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. Since 2008, a Dell Rugged notebook has been her work companion allowing her to report her travels whether she is sitting atop the Rocky Mountains or the Andes Mountains. Karen began her working relationship with Dell Rugged Solutions with an early generation notebook in 2008. That unit withstood three full years of rough, everyday use in every type of terrain imaginable. Karen became so enamored with the way our technology allowed her to work in the harsh conditions of her journey that she and Eric even came to Round Rock to shoot a vlog about their experiences with our products.
When it came time retire her original Dell Rugged notebook in 2011, she had no questions about what to replace it with—our next generation Dell Latitude E6400 XFR. The only qualm Karen had about the XFR was its weight. That’s why—after another three years of dedicated computing service in the wilderness—she recently switched to a much lighter, semirugged model in 2014.
A demand for lighter, more mobile rugged computing solutions was something we had heard from many of our customers. Holding deep conversations with customers during the design phase has been invaluable insight enabling us to meet the specific technology needs of our customers, and the basis of our customer loyalty. We show our commitment to alleviating their technology pangs and they keep coming back.
Karen’s travels while documenting the lesser-known and more adventurous parts of the Americas have taken her on a sojourn that is more than 100,000 miles—and counting. Through three different generations of notebooks, Dell Rugged Solutions is proud to have tagged along to ensure her work gets done no matter what jungle our mountaintop she is working in.
Drew is the Executive Director and General Manager for Dell’s Rugged Mobility Product line, with cradle to grave responsibility for the development, marketing, service and customer experience of these products designed to thrive in the harshest of work environments. Learn more at Dell.com/Rugged.
