With that admission out of the way I thought I'd talk about response and specifically how much corporate and personal credibility is tied to it. In one of my previous businesses I experienced no end of heartache caused by a couple of staff who simply didn't consider it a priority to respond to emails or voicemails in a timely manner - maybe they were too busy, perhaps they were too useless - I don't know. Either way for someone who prides himself on quickly and speedily dealing with things it came a surprise to experience the other side of things.
What has surprised me even more is the poor level of response from many vendors and their PR staff. In the past I've gone on record casting my doubts over the PR as an industry - while I am dubious about PR generally I will admit that it serves a purpose to filter and screen communications for a busy and time constrained company.
Which is all the more reason that I've been surprised and disappointed in some of my experience writing my Accounting 2.0 series.
Some vendors and PR people have been fantastic - replying to questions and requests quickly and accurately. Some however have been abysmal - I've had requests for demo accounts, screenshots and specification details ignored or not responded to for weeks. I've had promises of contact calls missed. Pretty much I've been turned off by a number of vendors.
Of course I don't let this impact on the reviews I write of their offering but I ask you - if a vendor can't find the time to reply to a media request how on earth can they manage to be responsive to a customer issue - critical or otherwise?
Vendors - your response, and the timeliness thereof, does matter!
Ben, perhaps you should have a 1 to 5 star rating for the pre sales response level that you have been experiencing for every review that you post. It would be nice to see such 'real world' scores against each product, as I believe with accounting systems especially, you want to know that the vendor is totally committed to the customer. Cheers, Devan
Devan - that's a really good idea but it'd probably be unfair to the products I've already reviewed to start it at this stage. I'll give it some thought though
I can't believe some PR folks still behave this way! They spend ages "crafting" a message they hope you will find appealing enough to give a mention to. They most likely leave a comment at the end of their e-mails, telling you to get in touch if they have any questions or need further information. But, what they really want is for you to copy and paste what they wrote to you, close the e-mail and forget about them until they next time they have news for you. It's really uncool.
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