This has been a very odd and busy week, and I do promise to get back to something like regular posting soon. For today however, I have two simple but unrelated topics.
First, like the cobbler’s children with no shoes, I am a marketing person who has not had enough time to spend on her own Web site, newsletter and blog design. Content is fine. Design not so much. So, I am starting to look around for designers who can help me with all three. I still want separate things, for a number of reasons, which I will document here as part of the process (later, not today), but I do want them to tie together thematically. I’ve got a few names from here and there, but I figured I’ve got some of the brightest, coolest blog readers on the planet, maybe they know the perfect person to help. Or could even do it themselves. Email me at sgetgood@getgood.com!!
Second, the tech support calls for bloody Good Technology have started up again. Two in the past week. The people who call don’t seem brain-damaged, which means the documentation for the product must be really lacking.
To refresh your memory, this began when I started my business in 2004 and took the “no robots, no spiders” code off getgood.com, which up til then had been a personal family site, and turned it into the site for GetGood Strategic Marketing.
On a regular basis, I would get telephone calls and emails from people looking for support for their “good link.” Did I have a clue? No, because I don’t have a TREO. I just told people they had a wrong number. Eventually, I did match it up to Good Technology, which makes a piece of mobile communications software for TREO phones. But I didn’t know why they were calling an independent marketing and communications consultant for help.
Then one day, I learned that the download link for something to do with this product is “http://get.good.com” Ta-duh!!! Now we knew why people were making the link from Good Technology to Getgood. You can read about this magical moment of discovery here.
I’ve emailed the PR person at the company relating my tale of woe (yes, as a marketing person, I know who cares about this sort of reputation thing) but to date, no answer. I’ve blogged about this before, in the hopes that maybe the company was monitoring blogs, but I was much nicer in my previous posts. I even posted information about them on both the Web site and the blog to help their customers. Not working.
So, here I am. Knowing the power of blogs, testing the power of blogs. I am not being so nice today.
Good Technology: please do something about this problem. I am very nice to your customers. I give them your URL and phone number. But this is both my business and my home. I am fed up with getting support calls from your customers who are having trouble with your software. I know that the problems are equally likely to be operator error as crappy software. And I understand if you can’t change the file name; you probably have tons of this software in the field.
But maybe you could put YOUR PHONE NUMBER somewhere so people stop looking up getgood.com and calling ME.
Thank you.
UPDATE, late pm: In the interest of fairness, I did email Good Technology’s PR and sales contacts about this whole thing this afternoon. I’ll let you know if I hear from them. Or if I don’t 🙂
Update, 9 September: I do realize that this a problem that affects only a few people, me and the occasional customers who get confused, but it would be nice if Good Technology at least apologized for the nuisance and thanked us for being pleasant to the customers. Instead:
Your message
To: Internal PR Person; Sales; PR Agency Person [names redacted because this is not about them]
Subject: Get.Good.Com versus getgood.com
Sent: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 15:31:55 -0700
was deleted without being read on Fri, 8 Sep 2006 23:19:07 -0700
Tags: Good Technology, Susan Getgood, Getgood, goodlink, Treo, customer service
Right from the home page.
http://www.good.com/corp/int_salesContactForm.php
Yes, I can find their phone number on the home page as well. But apparently, the mobile phones do not have sufficient documentation or a clear indication of who to contact regarding support for the “get.good.com” link. I do not have a Treo so I do not know. What I do know is that the calls died down over the summer but are now back. And we get them in the evening as well as during the day.
Susan, I think you may have an unsolveable problem. On a Treo (or other “smart device”) that supports Good Mobile Messaging there is normally a little icon that says “GetGood”. A potential customer clicks on the icon to automatically download the software client and begin setup. There is no place to insert descriptions, phone numbers etc…it’s just a button.
I am somewhat surprised that you are receiving calls and email since someone would have to be so technically confused as to not understand the icon while at the same time be savvy enough to look up your information on the web.
I do not know the numbers but Good has at least in the mid-hundreds-of-thousands of customers so I can only guess that statistics guarantee a few lost souls.
Your situation is analogous to the person whose phone number is one-digit different than that of the local pizza emporium.
Best,
jonathan
Jonathan, thank you for your email and the explanation. I don’t have a TREO phone, and Good Technology has never bothered to reply to any of my emails about the situation so I really didn’t have the full story.
I guess we’ll just keep giving folks the Good Technology info. I have started cc’ing their sales email address on my replies to the confused. Maybe I’ll see if I can find the CEO’s email, and start cc’ing him…..