Ideastorm - Premier

So many requests, so little time. I use Premier extensively all day long, every day. It is essential to my business as a Dell VAR. The following improvements would be great: 

1.       Accurate Premier catalog management. I have lost many customers due to order errors where an item shows up in my Premier catalog, an order is placed, and then it mysteriously disappears or is lost in processing due to changes in the item availability that were not accurately reflected in the Premier catalog. This is a serious issue and I would appreciate it being a high priority.

2.       Ability to set up Order Status as my log-in landing page. That is always my first stop.

3.       Links to Order Status from the top or second level top nav that is persistent on every page.

4.       Accurate and real-time status reporting for Order Processing, In Production and ESPECIALLY Shipping.

5.       No more lag in reporting shipping information. FedEx data often lags by 24 hours or more and that’s a colossal NUISANCE.

6.       Improved integrated with the Partner Portal and the ability to move between the Partner Portal Online Store and Premier with single click simplicity. Eliminate redundant logins and the need to scroll multiple pages between the two stores.

7.       Fix the asset management system!!! Enable us to get complete downloads of all Dell products that have service tags including systems AND peripherals. Make it easy to download asset reports and upload asset transfers. The current system requires special requests, incompatible Excel formats that must be extensively edited prior to uploading and incomplete asset reports. It’s a colossal NUISANCE. Please help.

8.       Enable real-time messaging to the sales team for on-the-spot communication, Q&A, price quotes, customer care and more. WebEx would be fantastic. Get with the 21^st Century ladies & gentlemen.

9.       Integrate priority direct connection to Customer Service and Tech Support for Premier users. Simplify the CS management system. Take a look at how Amazon does it for their Gold & Platinum merchants. Amazon is the VERY BEST I have ever seen anywhere.  The Premier site has been buggy over the last few months and a direct link to Tech Support would be a real benefit. Amazon uses eStara to have their support people call you right back which is something Dell should definitely implement for Premier support across the board.

10.   Extend the login time out to hours, not minutes. Another colossal NUISANCE when it times out in the middle of an active session.

11.   Integrate tax exemptions for multiple jurisdictions so that the correct tax or exemption shows during the checkout process. Too many errors are occurring with the back-end system now in place.

12.   Enable sales tax form and exemption management online via Premier. IBM and Lenovo both have much better systems for this. Dell’s is positively archaic and very error prone. It delays order processing to the extent that it has lost me business or jeopardized my customer relations with my clients. Took me over a year to get it well-oiled and we still have issues due to the most recent system changes that actually made things much worse, not better.

We need to make the Dell Premier page as easy to use as possible. Here are current inefficiencies that need improvement:

I use firefox so i am not sure if IE will be better... however the site should be coded to run in firefox like the rest of the world.

1. Login process
Our password and username do not autosave. The login system needs to both remember you forever if you want or to autosave.

2. Login timeout
It drives me nuts that the website times out and logs you out after a short time. I think the premier page logs me out quicker than my bank. We need to have an option to never be logged out.

3. Simplify equote and cart process.
There needs to just be 1, either cart of equote. I think equotes sounds nice but simple is better. Why don’t you guys just call it a eCart. Just have people add to cart... and have the cart autosave. I cant tell tyou the number of times I built a system for a client, got a phone call, went back into premier page and the system signed me out and I lost the cart. Autosave is crucial. Each cart should have a cart # and allow us to rename them. So when we need to send something to someone... we can just call it a cart # and not a equote #. Right now the whole system is so hard to use and drives us nuts. You should be able to save a cart with 1 click. Then you can email cart, or adjust cart, or check out.

4. Format of data
The specs are formatted VERY crudely. When we try to copy and paste those specs to anyone we have to spend 2 minutes cutting out all the irrelevant information such as product codes, blank spaces, and other junk. Then we do the same when plugging it into our invoice system. The way the specs display should be flawless… and you should just be able to copy and paste that into an email or an invoice or anywhere with zero editing required.

5. Simplify address book
We often to ship to same people. The current address book is ok but it is really difficult to use. This needs to be changed so you can just import your address book from outlook/exchange and ship systems off that.

I have a ton of other suggestions. I have seen HP’s systems and they are terrible but they are making big pushes toward efficiency.

I have plenty of other ideas. All I said above was just off the top of my head. Call me directly if you want to chat. 914.620.5319