Pet Hates

Cold weather, processed cheese, bad economics...companies to claim to provide a wonderful service, yet pay no heed when they are criticised.

Open Source companies need as much good PR as they can muster. The giants of the IT industry have huge marketing budgets, journalists in their pockets and bamboozling messages that leave you with no choice than to want their product and continue to pay for support and upgrades.

You might say the public are gullible but coming from the Contact Centre industry, I know first hand how much the giants value their customers because the customers pay the bills, vote with their pound/dollar/yen lined feed and if they don't like it, they go elsewhere. So stability and reliability of software are vastly important and not over looked.

Two weeks ago I tested some online collaboration software with a friend. It claimed to be a industry beating solution to the age old problem of sharing documents and desktop sharing to many participants for free. Web conferences are something many of us have participated in, some of us have even hosted them and the worst thing is when you have arranged people to attend a conference, where they have given up their valuable time and not only does it not work, but it's embarrassing. You're on the back foot. you've egg on your face and the kudos that you've build up to that point goes straight out the window, leaving you back at square one and your participants wondering whether they're onto a good thing or should they deal with someone who can deliver the goods.

So when a company says we can beat the best and at a fraction of the cost (£$) it's a compelling business proposition and I've got to look.

So my friend and I kicked off the conference. I setup and sent the invite. The invite did arrive by email and the link was dutifully click.

And clicked..

And clicked...

And I send the invite again and it arrived. And again the link was clicked.

And clicked...

And again it was clicked...

You get the picture. I wish I had. This software had the potential to be earth shatteringly good, a revolution based on Open Source. But we gave up and I sent an email to them to let them know what my experience was.

Did they get back to me??

NO. They haven't responded. I never received a response, not an acknowledgement. Nothing.

And this is what gets me. A company, regardless of who they are, thinking they have it made but are so arrogant that they don't listed to their customers. If I had been running that company, I'd be hungry for feedback. Good and back.

"Tell us what happened?"
"How did you feel?"
"What could have been different?"
"What would have made your experience better?"

Some acknowledgement would be nice. Some later feedback to say they took my comments on board and have incorporated them into the system.

I fear my email went into a black hole, like most it problems in IT, they are cured by the switch it off, switch it on mentality. But as this was a SaaS solution, it's not so easy.

So please Open Sourcers, if this is you and you want to challenge the Gold Gate big dogs, listen you your customers and value what they say and act!