Today I want to talk about poor products, poor customer support, and great people. I’m going to use a company that I’m very familiar with, but I’m not going to name at this time. That’ll prevent me from getting as specific as I’d like, but bear with me.
The product in question is a very complex web application. It is necessarily complex, at least on the back end. The scope of the application is huge (again, necessary,) and it has to do a metric ton of different things. These are pretty much non-negotiable in this space.
What’s the big deal, then? Complex applications are, well, complex by their very nature, right? Yes. And no. See, this application takes its complexity and smacks you in the face with it. Hard. Over and over, until your cheek is bleeding.
Bugs exist throughout the application. Worse, they persist for far longer than is reasonable. Days, weeks, even months pass without major bugs being resolved. Bug reports get bounced up and down the support chain. Level 1 will fail to understand the scope of the problem, so they’ll bump it to level two. Level two will confirm the problem, and bump it to level three for a resolution. Level three will declare that there is, in fact, no problem, and send it back down the chain. Rinse and repeat, while the customer still has a broken product.
When Support Doesn’t Understand
Complex applications tend to have complex bugs. Fixing complex bugs requires not only intelligent support personnel, but extremely well-trained and knowledgable support personnel. Not rocket science. However, when support repeatedly fails to grasp the scope of a bug, it’s very, very easy to get frustrated. When support tells you that A+B=F, when you know for a fact that A+B=C… it’s easy to lose your cool.
The Good People
Where do the good people come in? I though you’d never ask. Even this company, with its pile of issues ranging from an overly complex application riddled with bugs to a generally unhelpful support team, has some bright spots. Namely, a small handful of extremely bright people who care. Regular employees who actually, truly care are not exactly common. And they’re a fantastic asset to any company. But, and this is so important:
Good people can never overcome a bad product.
Read that again. No matter how good your people are, they can never overcome a bad product.
Unless these people are actively fixing the bad product. Then they have a chance. But rarely do such people talk to real live customers. Certainly not in the case of our mystery web application. My interactions with these bright spots are always positive, but with the same outcome: the product is still broken. Until that stops being the case, I can no longer be a customer.
Get your product right first. If you can’t do that, nothing else matters.