Here’s a Quick Way to Leave An Indelible Impression On Your Readers.
It’s three small words, that you’ve heard strung together a thousand times before, that I just know you’ve used yourself.
But first, let me tell you a story.
I’ve been using Dragon Naturally Speaking – the voice to text conversion software – since Version 7 came out, about six years ago. If you’d like a perfect example of it in use, watch the opening scenes of Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies, where Russell Crowe is using it. I loved Dragon Naturally Speaking to pieces, and loved the spike in speed and productivity it gave me. I recommended it to everyone. I was, in Seth Godin’s terminology, a sneezer.
The only problem was, when I got my laptop, the trade off in speed and power meant I couldn’t use Dragon anymore. I compromised (sulkily), and when my laptop died an early death less than two years later, I had learned my lesson well. I bought the most powerful desktop computer I could afford at the time. That moved me into the Vista 64 bit bracket. It also meant I could go back to using Dragon Naturally Speaking. Yay!! Well…so I thought.
I swiftly upgraded to the latest version of Dragon, bought a new headset to celebrate, and installed it…or tried. Two screens into the install, I was brought to a screeching halt by a screen stiffly informing me that the program couldn’t be installed on this operating system. End of message. And the install shut itself down.
What….?
I scampered over to the Nuance site and combed through the support pages, and found, buried, a notice saying that Vista 64 bit wasn’t supported.
Shame they didn’t put that on the damned sales pages so I could have found out before I bought it. I had to work my way through layers of phone support to get a magic support number to write on the box, then package it up, then post it to Nuance, then wait six weeks for a refund.
That same night, I dug deeper into the Naunce support pages and found another notice that said Nuance had no intention of releasing a Vista 64 bit version now or any time in the future.
Well take that, geeks of the world who dare to get the higher end operating system.
So I went back to using a keyboard, feeling deprived and somewhat irked at the way Nuance had kinda screwed me around on this one. At the same time, I also figured I probably should have researched a bit better, because I had run into this problem a few times with Vista 64 bit versions of programs just not being available – yet, or at all.
So I pushed the matter aside, and forgot about it, figuring that was the end of the story.
Fast forward about five weeks, and I get a phone call one evening when we were trying to get supper on the table. (Have you noticed these calls are always during supper, or right when you’re trying to get supper on the table? It’s never after supper, when you’re done, and relaxed and at your most receptive. Haven’t they figured that out yet?)
The call is from a chirpy young woman from Nuance who wants to know why I haven’t upgraded to Dragon Naturally Speaking Version 10 yet.
I believe I stood there, stunned, for at least twenty seconds. Which is quite a record, for me. I know everyone else in the kitchen went very quiet and started sneaking around me, so something must have shown on my face, anyway.
I explained very carefully and politely my recent experience with Version 10.
“Oh, nonsense!” she shot back at me, sliding right over the top of my implied indignation. “We’re developing a version for Vista 64 bit right now! I tell you what, as soon as we release it, I’ll send you a coupon for a really good discount, how’s that?”
Well, okay, I remember thinking. Despite her chirpiness, she knew something about customer relations, after all. I agreed that being informed about the new release would be nice, and a discount coupon would be a welcomed way to make up for all the inconvenience I’d already gone through.
So I filed the matter in the back of my mind, looking forward to getting back to using Dragon once more, and waited.
And waited.
In Getting Things Done terms, this was an open loop – something that kept pinging away on my radar. I didn’t write it down, or put it on a tracking system, or anything like that, but as I was looking forward to it so much, I didn’t need to. The matter kept popping up in my consciousness every now and again because I was anticipating the email, and the chance to start using Dragon again.
And I kept waiting.
Four weeks ago, I saw Russell Crowe using Dragon in Body of Lies, and it prompted me to wander over to the Nuance site to see if they had made public the upcoming date of the release for the Vista 64 bit version of Dragon.
And got the shock of my life. The 64 bit version has apparently been out for months. It’s been out so long I can’t even find the release date on the site any more.
I thought about it for a while. Then I sent them an email that:
- Outlined the story above in shortform.
- Told them how disappointed I was
- Told them I would never buy another Nuance product again
- Told them I had a blog where from time to time I review technological products for writers, and that I would tell everyone how Nuance customer service fails to deliver on its promises.
It was a stroppy email. I meant it to be.
In my day job, I deal with stroppy emails and letters all the time. Complaint letters get dealt with in sensitive and specific ways, and with a sense of urgency that I think all companies (and you’re a company!) should adopt. Why the urgency? You have no idea who the complainant knows, who she has sent a copy of her complaint to.
To borrow from Seth Godin again: You don’t know how much of a sneezer she is.
Fact is, after sending my stroppy email to Nuance, I have waited three weeks for Nuance to trip over themselves to fix things for me. To apologize in some way, to make amends, so that I could report to you guys that Nuance are still one of my favourite software companies and Dragon Naturally Speaking is still one of my favourite applications. Three weeks.
And for seven years before that I was a full-on sneezer for Nuance. I raved about Dragon Naturally Speaking. In fact, as little as three weeks ago, I recommended the product to a reader of Anchored Authors.
Nuance have just completely shot themselves in the foot. I’ve come about 180 degrees. I’ve become a negative sneezer. I’m going to grouse about them and their shitty customer service to everyone I know. While the product might remain okay, and yeah, they’ve got a corner on the market, do you really want to put up with the hassles of bad customer service to get it? Nuance have clearly grown complacent just because they do have a one-of-a-kind product, and frankly, they can shove that product somewhere sensitive. I have no intention of ever buying it again. And yeah, my ire is purely because I got screwed around by their customer service. It’s personal. That’s how bad customer service can screw your reputation for you.
Thing is, this blog post will remain here for as long as Anchored Authors is viable. So anyone who combs through my archives will find it. Anyone who searches Google for Dragon Naturally Speaking will trip over it, because I’ve made sure that the term is scattered through this article dozens of times, so it will register as highly relevant. And just as petty revenge, I have not put any live links to the Nuance site. I don’t want to make it any easier for them to make another sale.
I may have a small blog, and a small audience, but you will remember this post, too. And if you happen to hear a friend or writer colleague thinking of buying Dragon Naturally Speaking one day, do me a favour, and warn them of Nuance’s crappy customer service, and the fact that they completely fail to live up to their promises.
Yes, that’s how you, as an author, can impress your readers, every time.
Keep your promises.
You’ll be dealing with readers directly more and more, and there’ll be implied and direct promises made. “Sure, I’ll see if my publisher has some Spanish versions of that title for you.” “Let me find out if there’s a Kindle version.” “I’ll get back to you next week with the release date on the German series.” And so forth. Casual conversations, implied promises.
There’s bigger promises, too. The ones you bury in your manuscripts and your interviews. If you imply a character is going to live or die, or two characters are going to get together…or some story plot is coming to a head…you’d better deliver. You don’t have to deliver in the way a reader might think, but you’d better deliver something, and that something had better satisfy.
And if you think the reader won’t remember, you’re wrong. If you think delivering 24 hours later, or a month later, or a year later than you said you would won’t hurt, you’re also wrong.
I remembered. I was excited about it, looking forward to it. And I was let down when the company didn’t come through. And while happy customers aren’t always moved to spread the joy, unhappy customers are far more motived to bitch about it.
Don’t let your readers down. You don’t want dozens, or hundreds or a thousand versions of me, doing what I’m doing here, replicated a thousand times over.
Don’t let your readers down.
Keep your promises.
————–
Saturday PM update:
Nuance phoned me this afternoon. When they announced themselves on the phone, my pulse jumped, because I thought that they were calling about this blog post. And I thought wow! Fast reaction! And I settled in to discuss my account, their handling of it and what we were going to do about it.
So you can imagine my reaction when the fellow on the other end of the phone went into his spiel about the wonders that were Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 and why hadn’t I upgraded yet??????
I managed to trip him up mid-spiel and asked him if he were in front of a computer (I knew he was). I directed him to this blog post, and suggested that he read it, and that when he was finished, he could phone me back, if he wanted to continue to speak to me…or at least, that’s what I started to tell him.
Fact is he hung up me.
Nuance are hell bent on not hearing customer feedback.
This is the third time they’ve phoned me to ask why I haven’t upgraded to Dragon 10 (it’s only the second one I’ve reported here — I didn’t want to bore you with a useless repetition in the original post.) All three conversations have ended up going exactly nowhere.
This is getting so bad it’s becoming funny in a giggly, had-too-much-O3 kind of way. I’m wondering what Nuance will do next…because I honestly thought they wouldn’t be back the last time.
Stay tuned.
_____
On May 4, two days after the original post went live, I received an email from Kristen Wylie, Product Marketing Manager for Dragon NaturallySpeaking at Nuance. I have her permission to copy the email here:
Tracy –
I’m the product marketing manager for Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I came across your blog post earlier today and wanted to send you a personal e-mail to apologize on behalf of Nuance for your recent experience. There are a number of items that I would like to address with you. I’ll mention them briefly here in this e-mail, but perhaps it would be best if we talked live, at your convenience, so that we can better understand your circumstances and make the necessary corrective actions on our side.
First, I completely agree that customer service is essential to the success of a product. I am stunned that a service representative would hang up on a customer. I sincerely apologize for such behavior. It is also not acceptable that you have received multiple phone calls regarding upgrades, and yet you have not received a simple response to the inquiry you mailed to us last month. I checked around the office this morning and could not find the person that received the e-mail that you mentioned. This does not excuse our lack of response, but I do wish that someone on my team had received your note when it was sent so that we could have responded in a more timely manner. Regardless of whether you are an active blogger or not, you are a customer, and therefore your comments and concerns about our product deserve a timely response.
You are correct that in the past we have not done a good job of communicating with our customers. When Peter Mahoney took over as general manager of the Dragon division about a year ago, one of his top priorities was to change that. We still have a long way to go, but Peter’s initial efforts have already resulted in the creation of the Dragon blog (http://community.nuance.com/blogs/dragon/) which helps us to communicate more directly with customers. We also created a monthly customer newsletter, which includes tips and tricks, as well as product news and updates (such as updates on Vista 64-bit support plans).
I’d also like to add a few comments about our support of the Vista 64-bit operating system, which sounds like it was the original source of this problem: We launched version 10.1, which installs and runs on Vista 64-bit PCs, at the end of March. We needed to re-engineer Dragon to work with this operating system, and the engineering effort took quite some time. We are providing version 10.1 as a free upgrade to existing version 10 customers, and we are offering significant discounts for customers that purchased previous versions of the product.
I personally feel horribly that we managed to turn a “full-on sneezer” into a “negative sneezer.” Again, if you’re interested, I would like to have a phone conversation with you so that we can better understand how Nuance allowed this to happen. You mentioned that you will never buy Dragon again, and I can’t say that I blame you. I can’t change the negative experience that you had with our service organization, but I’d like to make an effort to improve your experience with the Dragon team. Perhaps we can win back your confidence in the future. Would you be willing to accept a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 10.1 at no charge? For someone that has used Dragon for so many years, it seems a shame that you should not have the latest version.
Regards,
Kristen
I responded to the email, and yesterday I had an hour-long call with Delphine Gabbay, who is in Product Management for their Dragon NaturallySpeaking division. The bulk of the conversation was a deconstruction of their sales representatives’ contact with me over the last six months or so, and the utter lack of follow-up. Gabbay freely admits that this was bad, bad salesmanship, and something they intend to look into, and that she was very grateful for the opportunity to discuss details with me. I supplied dates and time, and my location allows them to pin down call centres. The original post was all about keeping promises, so I won’t go into that here.
It appears that part of the reason I got three calls (when the calls should have stopped after the first one when I told them my situation) is because of bad customer database information. Which isn’t an excuse, just an explanation. Keeping clean customer data can be hell on wheels, especially if you have a very large database. But, this is a matter of logistics, and corporations juggle this sort of data all the time, and many of them do it successfully. This makes me think of my own little readers list, that I maintain myself…and I think I’ll maintain myself for as long as I can. Once you start handing the database out to agencies (or call centres), the chances for the information to become corrupted and screw ups like this to happen rise rapidly.
The rest of the call was a rolling conversation about Nuance’s plans to shrug off the awful reputation that is dogging them, and rebuild their image. This, I admit, is going to be a tough one for them, and I was frank about the fact. I even pointed that that Dragon is on the Top Ten Torrents download list partially because of their less-than stellar reputation. Gabbay agrees that it’s a challenge. The new general manager of the Dragon division, Peter Mahoney, has been in the job just on a year, and is clear about sweeping out the old detritus, though.
I don’t envy them their task. They’re not just starting from the start line. They’re starting from about a mile behind it, with a sprained ankle to boot.
But.
They called me. They listened. And I’m assuming they are going to follow up with their call centres and knock a few heads together. (I know I would.)
When you’re as behind the eight ball as they are, that’s all you can do. Limp forward a step at a time. Keep putting out the fires you can see, keep delivering sterling service, a stellar product (and all through this entire schmozzzle, I’ve never, ever had a beef about the product). Keep doing all three and slowly, slowly, the pendulum starts to swing the other way.
I’ll be watching to see how they do.
Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure: I accepted the copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking they kept offering me. I hummed and hawed over it on the days leading up to the conference call, because it felt a little bit like a pay-off. In the end I took the copy because 1) they never once asked me to take down the original post or do anything else that resembled a cover-up or wipe-out. 2) They didn’t ask me to do this update. This was my idea. 3) I wanted it. I haven’t been able to find an open-source replacement and I loved Dragon 7, and loved the huge upswing in productivity I got out of using it, before I had my laptop. I wanted that productivity back.
First appeared on Anchored Authors in April/May, 2009
____________
Tracy Cooper-Posey © 2009. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission.
Tracy Cooper-Posey © 1999 - 2012 