Sunday, March 13, 2005
Making the World Love Us
Stilly has mentioned that he thinks blogs can lead to a better customer-client relationship. While I don't disagree - I think the idea has a lot of potential - I found myself today yet again wishing for something a bit more direct.
In my last job, there was pretty much just me and the boss of the company. It meant I'd generally hear about almost every concern the users had with the software - either directly when I was on-site, through phone calls or through my boss. If someone told me something didn't work, I could fix it, and tell them. Or I could explain how they were actually meant to use it. Or I could tell them why a feature was shit.
In the six months I've been with Tower, I've met a surprising number of people who us our product. Well, maybe it's not that surprising, given Canberra. But a lot of the people I've spoken to have had some issues with TRIM. That's to be expected - any software as advanced and complex as TRIM will cause people problems. I'm still in the habit of trying to find out just what people don't like about TRIM and why.
But I don't have anything useful I can do with the information.
I want to be able to say to someone "I spoke to a guy yesterday. They seem to have some issues creating Records - sounds like their Record Types are a bit fucked. They also sound like they'd benifit from some better training, since they don't seem to be using TRIM enough. Oh, and they seem confused about being able to store classified documents" and know that at least a phone call would be made. I'd like to be able to say "apparently these people are having memory problems with their Event Manager when they try to use their custom interface." and know that next week we'll make an offer of assistance. I would really make me happy to be able to say "whatever the integrator has built is causing problems" and know that someone will look into it and be ready to crack heads if the rumour is true. I want to be able to tell someone that people have TRIM installed on their machines but they don't even know what it is.
I guess I just want everyone to love our software. I want to be able to say "I work for Tower" and have people say "Oh! We use TRIM and it's fantastic!" (which, to be fair, I do get sometimes as well). So what I want is to be able to say when people tell me they aren't happy with our product, that if they give me their number, maybe I can get someone to look into it for them.
In my last job, there was pretty much just me and the boss of the company. It meant I'd generally hear about almost every concern the users had with the software - either directly when I was on-site, through phone calls or through my boss. If someone told me something didn't work, I could fix it, and tell them. Or I could explain how they were actually meant to use it. Or I could tell them why a feature was shit.
In the six months I've been with Tower, I've met a surprising number of people who us our product. Well, maybe it's not that surprising, given Canberra. But a lot of the people I've spoken to have had some issues with TRIM. That's to be expected - any software as advanced and complex as TRIM will cause people problems. I'm still in the habit of trying to find out just what people don't like about TRIM and why.
But I don't have anything useful I can do with the information.
I want to be able to say to someone "I spoke to a guy yesterday. They seem to have some issues creating Records - sounds like their Record Types are a bit fucked. They also sound like they'd benifit from some better training, since they don't seem to be using TRIM enough. Oh, and they seem confused about being able to store classified documents" and know that at least a phone call would be made. I'd like to be able to say "apparently these people are having memory problems with their Event Manager when they try to use their custom interface." and know that next week we'll make an offer of assistance. I would really make me happy to be able to say "whatever the integrator has built is causing problems" and know that someone will look into it and be ready to crack heads if the rumour is true. I want to be able to tell someone that people have TRIM installed on their machines but they don't even know what it is.
I guess I just want everyone to love our software. I want to be able to say "I work for Tower" and have people say "Oh! We use TRIM and it's fantastic!" (which, to be fair, I do get sometimes as well). So what I want is to be able to say when people tell me they aren't happy with our product, that if they give me their number, maybe I can get someone to look into it for them.
# posted by Simon Dugard @ 6:03 pm 
