About customer support. Part III

This is the third installment of this 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 support.

The case of the non-closing PowerPoint application

About a month ago, I discovered that Add-in-Express 2009 has introduced a very cool new feature. The ability to create windows like the tasks panes introduced on Office 2007 in older versions of Office. They call this feature "advanced task panes".

Many of my users are still using Word and PowerPoint 2003. This has prevented me taking full advantage of what I believe is a great interface for add-ins. In the future, most of my add-ins are going to include at least one of these advanced task panes.

For example, below is shown the user interface of my new PowerMerge addin, showing a task pane with the fields used on the presentation.

Right after implementing my very first advanced task pane, I compile and run the add-in and it shows beautifully on PowerPoint. The only problem is that PowerPoint refuses to close. It simply hides itself and continues running in the background.

What technical support was supposed to be

This is no good, so I send an email to Add-in-Express technical support. I recall that at some point in the past, I discovered a bug in their implementation of Office 2007 task panes in PowerPoint, so I ask them if they have checked their new advanced task panes with PowerPoint.

I receive their answer: "Yes, they have checked and they work". And a suggestion: "Maybe there is a conflict with another add-in installed on my system. Can I please check?".

I do check, and indeed there are two add-ins that seem to "cause" the problem. One is the PowerPoint recording add-in of TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio and the other is the add-in for a text-to-speech application. I report that information to them.

The support guy at Add-in-Express downloads the trial of the text-to-speech application and discovers that the add-in is a "feature" of the commercial version. So, he contacts me to ask if I can contact the vendor to explain my problem and ask for a "trial" version of the add-in for them to make their tests.

I, therefore, contact the vendor of the text-to-speech application. In a couple of days, I receive the following answer:

[Name supressed] addin toolbars are stable. You can try again.
Sorry, we have no trail (sic) version of full version.

I won’t comment on this message. But, I’d like to say that I am actively looking for an alternative text-to-speech solution, and I regret the day I purchased that one.

Since the text-to-speech route seems to be a road block, I contact TechSmith to tell them the problem and know what might cause it. The support guy there tells me that he’s spoken with a developer who suspects that the problem is related to their add-in hooking into some of PowerPoint events (as most PowerPoint add-ins do). So, I pass on the information, hoping that it is useful.

I don’t know if Add-in-Express developers have carefully studied their code, or they have installed Camtasia Studio in a test system and debugged PowerPoint. Whatever method they have used, yesterday I received the following message from them:

We have fixed this issue. The fix will be available in the next release.

So, in summary, in the month or so that has taken to sort out this thing, Add-in-Express support staff:

• Have taken full responsibility for the problem.
• Provided a useful suggestion, hours after receiving the first notice of the problem.
• Downloaded the evaluation version of the text-to-speech program, only to discover that the add-in was a "feature" of the commercial version.
• Finally, solved the problem as soon as they found a way to reproduce it.

All of that without ever "scalating" the issue or suggesting that the problem was not their fault since it only occurred when other third party components were present on the system.

Thank you very much, again, Add-in-Express.

Update: Today I have received a notice from Add-in-Express saying that they have a new version available that solves the problem. Hurrah!