Just when you think customer service can't get worse...

Imagine trying to get away with this level of "customer service" in the IT world.

We have an eight year old Whirlpool dishwasher which died recently. A service technician came out and unsuccessfully tried some fixes before deciding that the problem lay in the circuit boards. I can accept that - dishwashers create lots of steam and there may be corrosion on a contact somewhere. The technician disappeared to get information on replacing the board and nothing happened for a fortnight until we followed up with a series of phone calls.

To cut a long story short, we had a call last night from a person working in spare parts who advised up that the parts were now available - two separate circuit boards costing $450 and $500. So add in a service call and we were probably looking at over $1,000 to fix our dishwasher.

• Why couldn't the technician who came out to see us figure out which of the boards were faulty - the spare parts person didn't know.
• Could replacing just one of the boards fix the problem? - the spare parts person didn't know.
• If replacing the two circuit boards didn't fix the problem then would we get the cost of those parts refunded? - Of course not... now did we want the parts or not?

The dishwasher is long out of warranty and I don't have a problem paying for a replacement part plus a service call to install the part. What blows my tiny little mind is the Whirlpool corporate attitude that puts the responsibility for diagnosing and fixing the problem back on the customer. Apparently they are quite happy to keep selling us additional spare parts until we stumble across the one that makes it all better.

Both the technician who made the original service call and the person selling us the parts were courteous but I can't say the same for the corporate policy on repairing their equipment. I'll send this information to Whirlpool and if they want to give me their give me their version of the story then I'm happy to give them equal time on this blog.

NOTE: It wasn't a Whirlpool technician who originally came out to see us - it was an appliance service organization - but if Whirlpool authorizes them to resell Whirlpool parts and service Whirlpool equipment then Whirlpool will cop the PR flack when it all goes wrong.

"Guess who's mum won't be buying another Whirlpoool".
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IBM to cut Australian workforce?

According to CRN, IBM is considering cutting 800 jobs in Australia and (co-incidently I'm sure) looking to hire c.1,200 in China and India. That may work with back-office tasks like payroll and paper-shuffling but IMHO it's a bad move when...

"... workers have been told that IBM may service all its customers besides the Federal Government from "low cost centres" in India and China."

There's nothing in the article to indicate whether the Lotus group will be trimmed. I can't say if there's any fat left in the Lotus team but I do know that some of those busy little beavers have been working fairly long hours for quite a long time. It's not unusual to get an email from one of them stamped 10:00pm or later.

When you make your product delivery into a commodity then you run the risk that your customers will see all of your products as a commodity and decide to buy on price alone. I guess the upside is that IBM will be forced to rely more on its Business Partners as its feet on the ground.
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OT: Size IS everything... I'm glad Australia is only a 4

This table shows the size of deficit as a percentage of GDP and Australia is near the bottom of the rankings.
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Free SameTime/Quickr training in Sydney

One interesting factoid that came out of the R8.5 Proof of Technology seminars that we have been running in Sydney is that not many (actually, almost none) of the attendees were aware that organisations with a current Lotus software subscription were entitled to run Lotus SameTime Entry and Lotus Quickr Entry in their environment at no extra charge.

Since Terry Boyd and I are having such fun running our R8.5 Domino seminars we have decided to start a new series of one day seminars to show people how to install and use the Sametime and Quickr software that they have already have. The seminar will be in Sydney in mid-May (date to be decided) with SameTime in the morning and Quickr in the afternoon so you can book for just half a day if you want.

The SameTime sessions will include:

• What can Sametime do - a demonstration of the full product.
• Installing Sametime - system requirements and integration with existing Domino servers.
• Administering a SameTime server.
• Advanced features - eg linking to other IM systems
  

A similar set of sessions will be held for Quickr in the afternoon.

Contact me (details on the left) if you want a free ticket for yourself or your managers to this SameTime/Quickr training. Limit two attendees per company.
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Score 1 for Twitter and Amnesty International

I've always been a bit down on Twitter because I could never see the business benefit of the technology. Sure, it's great for telling everyone that you're "Leaving work now" or "I hate my boss" or "What about those Dragons? Did you see that last goal?" but I could never see how it systematically fed into a corporate bottom line by increasing profit or cutting costs. People spoke about marketing by Twitter and I tried to imagine hordes of housewives descending on the local shoe store when they were tweeted "All women's shoes 40% off for two hours" but that picture wouldn't work for me. If this was the future of communications then I was sticking with Lotus and UCC.

I'm glad to say a penny has dropped (and if I put this with the penny that dropped about LotusLive last month then I'm getting wiser and richer at the same time).

In our R8.5 Proof of Technology seminar in Sydney this week an IT Manager from Amnesty International explained how they use Twitter to update their subscribers about the various campaigns that they run and suddenly it all made sense. When your PRODUCT is actually those small bites of information then Twitter gives you the ability to fulfill your customer's 'purchase orders' rapidly and at very low cost. Who needs a monthly snail-mail newsletter when you can feed your subscribers the information as it happens? Not everyone will have the same type as "product" as Amnesty International but "When the shoe fits, Tweet it!".

You can sign up on the Amnesty Australia twitter link here.

Now I'm going to find the next Penny before it drops... where's that Facebook site? Oh dear, I need to enter my bank account details and password first? Well, if you say so...
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Whoa there! Say that again please...

The Registar's review of Lotussphere had an interesting quote from an un-named IBM spokesperson.

In another of IBM's Lotusphere announcements, the company claimed: "From 3Q 2008 to 3Q 2009, IBM's social collaboration software install base grew by 34 per cent."

But by simply checking back to it's third-quarter earnings report, the company said that tevenues from Lotus software - "which allows collaborating and messaging by clients in real-time communications and knowledge management" - dropped 9 per cent over that same period.

Has IBM been giving the software away for free? When asked to explain how Lotus revenue shrunk while its user base grew by double-digits, IBM said the 34 per cent growth number was actually only counting Lotus Connections and Quickr software - which accounts for less than 20 per cent of the overall breadth of the Lotus portfolio.

"It's about the total size of the pie," the same IBM spokesman claimed. "The IBM collaboration segment overall is either holding or gaining market share in each of its submarkets against the competition. The problem is the whole pie is shrinking. Microsoft is losing more seats than IBM is."

OK, I understand the logic of what is being said here regarding market segments (sales of Connections are good but sales of Notes are bad), but what does this 'pie is shrinking' comment refer to? Notes seats might be moving to LotusLive but isn't that all considered as part of the same email pie?

Anyone got any ideas on this one?
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Why does the Microsoft Pot call the Lotus Kettle 'Black'?

The ZDNet Q&A with Alistair Rennie was good, but an interesting marketing point was buried in the interviewer's summary:

"For many of us, Lotus is viewed as an older brand that was popular in the 1990s. For the foreseeable future, you’ll see enterprises with Microsoft Office as well as various alternatives. IBM’s task is to make sure Lotus is always in the conversation as the Google Apps and Docs and Microsoft scrum intensifies."

I know the Redmond Mafia has done an enormous amount of work over the years to paint Lotus Notes as a 'legacy' product, and a lot of the Microsoft Mud has stuck. But if Notes (first released in 1989) is legacy software then what about...

• Microsoft Word first released in 1983 – six years before Notes
• Microsoft Windows and Excel first released in 1985 – four years before Notes
• Unix was created in 1969 – twenty years before Notes
• Microsoft Exchange 4.0 released in 1996 – fourteen years ago (I well remember the Microsoft verbal gymnastics of that era regarding the 'completely new' Exchange product which somehow was entitled to inherit its version number from the recently superseded Microsoft Mail 3...)
  

I'm not suggesting that IBM/Lotus get into 'tit-for-tat' negative marketing, but surely Microsoft's own product history allows IBM/Lotus an ethical and accurate advertising counterpunch to show that Longevity is not equivalent to Legacy.
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