Hammer Time

I’m getting too old for this shit; strings of allnighters don’t mix well with cross country flights… anyhow, feeling much better about things after the all nighter and whats going on. Flew to Dallas yesterday, back in Orlando in the new office now. Here is the oneliner that kind of made my week:

“Taking time off future tasks to address current problems? Yeah, I remember when Microsoft did that in 2001, thank god their software hasn’t been plagued by security issues since then!”

Smartasses. But the point is valid, whether I like it or not, this is the high tech field and it waits for noone, forgives no mistakes. To be honest, I think I may have overblown the severity of this without cause because I tend to take people at their word – after all, they are my partners, why would they mislead me if we share a common interest? Well, here is what numbers revealed – thousands of partners making a ton of money off virtually all of our products. Over 80% of those have not opened a single ticket! Of the 20% of the partners that did, roughly 100 partners and/or clients have caused over 50% of the support cases.

Now…. either we suck horribly, horribly bad for those 100 companies while 14,000+ are OK, or we allowed some people that really do not qualify to offer our products without knowing how to support/troubleshoot them. That was my first question. Then I got to see the breakdown per criteria – the number of tickets opened where it was clear that the user did 0 troubleshooting and was just handing the bucket off to the vendor “just checking if its you” (me) – 60%. We’re not talking about companies that had legitimate issues, that even opened tickets on daily basis or for the same thing over and over again – I’m talking about guys who at any time had 8 outstanding tickets asking the same questions that were answered in the manual but they didn’t read it because, and I quote: “I wanted your answer to these questions before I waste my time reading through a bunch of text.”; Mind you that this includes the legitimate support requests, service issues, problems, orders, etc.

So either we suck or some of our partners don’t deserve to be in our partner program. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle and I will take the responsibility for it because I am the one that allowed everyone with a decent web site into the partner program. I will admit and take responsibility for the issues with the billing, with the service quality and for poorly qualifying and training my partners. Thats my bad, and we will fix it. This is also where it gets ugly – there is rampant abuse of the system as it is right now and that will have to adjust as well.

I am very optimistic about this and I promise you this will not take long. The mockups that were presented last night will all be live by the 1st and I will give you a preview of them tonight. If you get a chance to take a look through them and give me a quick thumbs up or thumbs down I would really appreciate it. We will fix these issues, and we will fix them fast.

BillG.