From time to time I participate in a discussion with fellow independent software developers about customer support. Over the years, I have come to understand that there are basically three approaches:

1. Those that hate it. Plain and simply.
2. Those who think that it is just another cost of doing business.
3. Those that believe that it is the single most effective marketing device available.

I’ll start declaring that I belong at heart at the third category.

These are strange times indeed

A friend of mine said once that we are living in a time in which you have to fight for the obvious, be it Global Warming, the true causes of the recent financial crisis or corporate strategy.

I am mentioning it, because I am at a complete loss when I see how most big companies are externalizing customer support. It is funny, if it wasn’t really another sad symptom of the current craziness of the world we live in.

One of the first business strategy lessons you learn is that the one who owns the client owns the business.

Yet, those big corporations pay external consultants a bunch of money to be told that they could save a few cents by externalizing customer support.

Of course, then they pay a different kind of consultants another bunch of money to create all sorts of annoying customer surveys to try to regain some knowledge about what their clients think or want. A complete waste of time and resources.

I believe that this creates a huge opportunity for new and innovative companies that still understand that a business is just a way of make money out of solving someone else problems.

A little tale

I have received lately two messages from a user that is totally at a loss about how to use FormsAssistant. The messages are:

First message:

I’ve having a mental block on getting the fill-in functions to work.  Could you please complete an example for me?  I think one simple example could help.

How do I code a field to populate with data (my name).  And, how do I code the clip so that my name will appear?

Second message:

Just to clarify -

If I wanted to use the name entered in "Dear [Name] again later in the letter, would I have to go to that next field and select the name from the available clips?  So, it doesn’t have the capability to populate all [Name] fields with the name / data inserted in the "Dear [Name] field?

Well, it is clear to me that this particular person is not understanding at all how does FormsAssistant work. He must be dumb, doesn’t he?

No, he is not dumb at all. What these messages really mean is that I have not done a good job of explaining FormsAssistant. What is obvious to me, does not mean anything to a person that, as you can see on the two quoted messages, is an intelligent person that does a really good job of expressing himself. So, I have explained FormsAssistant in terms of what I do understand, but have not been able to communicate these ideas with him.

What I have done is to answer politely to both messages, trying to explain better to him what FormsAssistant does.

What I would love to do, is to take the phone and talk to this guy to learn why I have made such a bad job of explaining FormsAssistant on the web site, the user interface and the help file.

And, of course, to thank him personally for expending his valuable time to let me know that I am not the brilliant programmer I sometimes think I am.

You know, on this business, when someone does not understand what your program does in about 10 seconds, a click on the back button of the browser loses you a sale.

I have uploaded a new version of FormsAssistant that includes the following three changes to the product:

• Removed the auto-update system: The auto-update feature has been removed from the product.
• Process and replace fields on headers and footers: A new option has been added to enable using fields inside headers and footers of documents.
• Process and replace fields on text boxes: A new option has been added to enable using fields inside text boxes contained in documents.

Note that the last two features have been added as an option because processing headers, footers and text boxes results in a noticeable delay in the processing of documents.

Please visit the download page to get the new version.

What’s next

This will be the last 1.x version of FormsAssistant. I have just started the development of version 2. Most of the new features have been already implemented and tested, so the new version development will mostly consist in integrating these features on the main application. Therefore I expect beginning the beta test sometime during the next month of September.

I have finally uploaded Control Runner v4.0. Although the program has been finished for at least two months now, several issues (not related to Control Runner per se) have prevented me from releasing it earlier.

For that reason, I want to apologize to all my users that have been contacting me lately wanting to know what was happening.

I have to say that I have been using fairly stable 4.0 versions since the start of the year, so I have almost forgotten how was Control Runner 3.4, but for those of you that have not participated in the beta test, I am sure you are going to love the new version.

How to upgrade

I have decided to provide a free upgrade to all users that purchased the product after 1/1/2008 since I originally planned to release version 4 at the beginning of this year.

Users that purchased Control Runner before that date will have a 60% discount

In the next few days, the new customer portal will be live. This will be the preferred way to get the free upgrade keys or the link to the special upgrade price. Meanwhile, please Contact me to get instructions.

Again, thank you very much for your patience.