Dell Reaches "Unreachable" Emerging Markets Audience

With over 40,000 employees in offices dotted over 34 different countries communication is essential to Dell. Like most large corporations it manages a lot of its internal communication through monthly briefings. Key to this are the 400 partners based in its emerging markets such as Latin America, India, and the Baltic states.

But Dell found that only a handful of these partners were attending their briefings on a regular basis and these numbers were declining. Not good news for Dell’s growth in those markets. ‘Our partners in the emerging markets are not finding it cost effective to attend our partner briefings’ stated one of Dell’s communication managers. One partner from Uzbekistan took this one step further by saying that at $200 for the monthly conference call the ‘cost is too high for us to bear’.

Vision 360 have long specialised in narrowband webcasting, reaching the audiences that other broadband providers discount as “unreachable” or “of little value”.

When Dell approached us to create a solution we created ‘telephone webcasting’. The solution is simple and effective, we dial in to the existing monthly conference call and rebroadcast it on the web at a narrow enough rate to work on any modem speed, down to 14.4kbps. The slides for the briefing are converted from Powerpoint into Flash and simultaneously broadcast live, then the entire briefing is archived permanently on the web allowing the Partners to access this information wherever and whenever they want.

The ultra-narrowband webcast has more than quadrupled the attendence of the live partner briefings, with even more Partners reviewing the archives. The very first webcast went from 20 participants on the phone to 80 on the web. The solution has been so successful that Dell have now increased the briefings from monthly to weekly.