About customer support. Part II
This is a continuation of my previous post. The first one was a little negative, so I’d like to present the other face of this issue. There are indeed software companies that thrive to provide a good customer support.
My products use a number of third party components. Of these, there are two that are extremely important to me:
- The protection system. I am using Oreans WinLicense to protect all my applications and add-ins.
- The office add-in framework. I am using Add-in-Express as the basis to create all the add-ins.
These two components have two things in common: A great portion of the "hard to track bugs" found on my products are caused by, or related to, these two components. On the other hand, the support provided by these two companies is absolutely top-notch.
I don’t know if there are other products that would perform the same functions for me and are better, or cheaper. I don’t care. Their support is so good that I won’t look for an alternative solution to those two backbone functions. Period.
The Oreans history
I have had many support needs for them. This is not strange because their protection system is likely to cause all kind of conflicts with running applications -as an example, for security reasons, my applications are not allowed to run when a debugger is detected- or cause my executables to be flagged as a virus.
Last week, I received a bug report from a customer that had just purchased PowerTOC. I hate when someone purchases a license, and immediately tells me that the product won’t work. I really feel very bad about it.
To make things worse, the problem was totally new to me. PowerPoint will crash on startup and disable PowerTOC on the next run. This is a serious issue.
I offered a remote assistance session to the customer, which he accepted. Fortunately, just before starting the remote session, the customer discovered that the "culprit" was McAfee HIPS. Disabling it solved the problem.
Time to contact Oreans, I thought. I sent them a message and, in a few hours I received a very detailed answer with a possible solution to this problem. I have followed their advice, and it seems to work.
The Add-in-Express history
This is what originally made me write this series, and will be the topic of another post. Please keep tuned.
[...] series. On Part I, I rumbled about the craziness of not providing good technical support, while on Part II and III, I am providing concrete samples of what I consider to be top notch [...]