Relinquished Retention

I’ve recently lost a lot of time to lousy upgrades put out by two vendors I’ve relied heavily on for many years. Not happy. So why am I sticking with them?

I recently wrote about the challenges of making a sale. We all know how hard it is to convince our buyers to shift gears and come over to us. All the more important, then, to manage major transitions with excellence in order to retain that precious trust.

I spent a lot of my day in email and note taking—certainly more time than I want to. So when my email client starts sending html source code to important clients, and my note taking app stops synching reliably … well, you can picture my dismay.

What happened here?

On the face of it, both vendors simply released a major upgrade without telling me. If they had, I could have turned off auto-update and taken a look at the reviews before diving in. No doubt about it—I would have held off.

But really what happened here is that my trust has been taken for granted. Both vendors failed to fully test the new stuff they released to their customer base. I’m sure I’m not the only one to see these problems—any user running the current version of iOS would have faced the same disruption.

But I’m a nice guy, I’ve been living the challenges of tech for over three decades, and I want these folks to succeed. So I dutifully reported the problems, taking pains to provide all the details they would need in order to “recreate the bug”. And they’ve responded ok, I guess. So far.

For now, I’m sticking. We’ll see.

Please don’t put your hard-won customers in the same position.

QA
Ask your customers how well they think you test your product before you ship it to them.

What insights did you receive? How will that impact your plans?

Here’s more on the $ value of quality.

Graham Binks is the author of Trusting Technology, a book about forming ideas, exploring opportunities with customers and colleagues, and building your future together. Graham speaks and writes regularly at www.grahambinks.com/blog.