Turtle opened this issue on Jul 09, 2002 ยท 9 posts
lgrant posted Tue, 09 July 2002 at 2:22 PM
There's an old saying: "The customer may not always be right, but he's always the customer." In addition to letting you sleep better at night, treating the customers well is a good business practice, because if they have a happy experience with your product, they are more likely to come back for more. Even when the customer is wrong, treating him with patience is a good thing. One vendor recently posted about a customer who wrote him, all angry because the product didn't work, and said it was the worst product he had ever seen. The vendor either fixed the problem, or showed the customer what he was doing wrong. (I don't remember which.) The customer wrote back and said that it was the best customer service he had ever experienced. By being patient, and responding promptly, the vendor turned an angry customer into a loyal supporter. I read somewhere that 50% of the software that is purchased and downloaded on the web is never used, because the customers can't figure out how to install it and get it working. Rather than contacting the vendor, people just discard the software, and make a note not to buy from that vendor again. If this is at all reflective of the Poser community, then a lot of people who have problems with your product aren't going to tell you. The ones who care enough to speak up should be treasured. We use Pro Pack, and when we first started at this, we didn't ship RSR thumbnails, since Pro Pack doesn't produce them. It wasn't till we got a note from a customer, telling us she loved the product, but the thumbnails didn't work, that we knew that we had a problem. We learned how to make RSR thumbnails, and now we have a better product. We had French customer tell us the other day that our product didn't work in the French version of Poser, because the directory structure is different. (The directory names are in French.) That gave us an opportunity to learn how to package products for that version of Poser. Some customers who complained have become testers for special environments that are hard for us to duplicate. Others have been added to our team. This really is a partnership. Our job is to make and sell products, but we haven't really succeded unless the customers can use the products to do their job, whatever that is. Lynn Grant Castle Development Group