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Back when I asked why Omega did not have a presence on this list I
referenced the comment by saying that many other lists and newsgroups
devoted to products maintain either one or several tech support people paid
by the company to answer customer questions. Some of these lists and
newsgroups have much less than 500 unique users at any given time. These
companies also maintain formal tech support staffs, newsletters of their
own, chat forums, and websites. These companies see a value in providing
these services to their customers, and as a result even though most of the
questions on these lists are of a how do I get this thing to work nature,
there is an ongoing dialogue and process to help arrive at a solution. What
is the result? People know that they have a source for answers, that they
can be exposed to other users who can give them ideas about what else they
can do with their software, and the company has a way to keep loyal users
from turning into frustrated migrators. And the bitch level is minimal.
Do these companies maintain these lists? Often not. Do they value their
presence there. I think they most certainly do.
As for being driven off the list, I think if Omega paid some of its tech
support staff to monitor this list, (and who is to say they don't already)
and their job was to provide support, not marketing in disguise, and there
were several of them so that no question would go unanswered for more than a
half hour, I doubt that they would be bashed. They might be challenged and
realize that they often had to say our software doesnt do what you want. But
if this got back to the development team there could be solutions
forthcoming. What it would require is a change in attitude. They do not have
the right attitude now, or else we would not be having this discussion. If
this was my company I would have my people anywhere my product was being
discussed. Standard policy.
I have some software that actually updates itself. It tells me when a new
version is available, and asks me if I want to update. Then it updates
itself, by downloading upgraded components, and restarts itself. This
happens fairly frequently. I have written to software developers and said
gee nice program but could you make it do this? The next thing I know I see
an upgrade with the exact feature I had asked for. Do I promote those
products? You bet I do. There is so much Omega could do with this thing
that would be progressive and positive. Instead of having 500 or 1000 or
2000 suspicious, disgruntled users, they could have the same number of
satisfied, word spreading customers. It all comes down to attitude.
d
-----Original Message-----
From: Howard Jackson [mailto:hrjf4@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 1999 6:57 AM
To: Carroll Slemaker; Ron Augustine; omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: TS2K - works
Correct me if I am worng, but this is not a tech
support forum. This is a user forum. It is NOT
created, maintained or anything (really anything) by
Omega.
Then there is the fact that whenever anyone 'official'
has spoken in this formum he has been bashed to death
- or if you will, driven off the list.
And then, if memmory serves me right, the list goes
out to little over 1,000 email address. And everybody
I personally know that is on the list has at least two
names. I would not be surprised if there were 500 or
less people reading all of this. And some of them are
competitors (Mark Brown for example, I'm sure there
are metastock and WallStreet analyst employees and who
knows who else?)
So it is 500 of how many Omega users? 12,000? 15,000?
Support to this list would reach about 5% of all
customers.
So would it be worth for Omega the personnel and the
agraviation of listening to a bunch of people bitch
all day? is it their obligation? would it help?
I would say the answers to these questions are maybe,
no and a little.
And don't get me wrong, I would love to see Omega
provide A LOT MORE support and educational options
that what they have now (specially better manuals).
H
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