Cloudforce Boston

Wow

That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the Boston Cloudforce event put on by Salesforce.com. I'm actually pissed that we have been a salesforce.com customer since 2003 and I have never been. It's a great event and now one of two events I plan to make every year. The other is VMUG in Freeport, free all you can eat lobster and steak is hard to pass up.... Oh and they have presentations on VMWare too.

Now cloudforce didn't have free lobster, though it did have an open bar (though I don't drink so would have traded the beer and wine for a burger). It wasn't because Marc Benioff talked about how innovative Enterasys is for integrating social networking on network management. He did of course, but that wasn't why I thought it was so cool.

I was just super impressed how the whole salesforce.com team told the story of the "Social Revolution" and how cloud is passe now. I guess we have been talking about cloud for years now. Everything is social now. But they also showed how that helps.

The talked about "Toyota Friend" where you can friend your Toyota and get stats on everything about your car. WIsh VW had that for my Jetta TDI actually.

They showed a great video about KLM airline where they would use social networks to find people that were stuck in their terminal, and figure out what they would like for a gift and actualy deliver it. They called it KLM Surprise.

They showed a demonstration of a support person using facetime to, in real time, troubleshot an issue with a video conference unit, based on a facebook comment they saw.

Marc also talked about the three steps to become a social company. I ended up with about ten ideas I want to go do right away, including half a dozen new ISAAC ideas...

I did get a copy of "Behind the cloud" which is Marc Benniof explaining how salesforce.com came about. I'm only on page 50 but so far think this is my new favorite business book. If you ever get a chance to go to one of these events, do it...

In search of good customer service

I spent this past weekend writing a letter to a door company, complaining about their customer service. Now in reality it didn’t take me all weekend to write the 5 page letter, but I did spend most of the weekend fuming about how bad their support is and thinking about how important service after the sale is.

You see we tried to call the local office and they did try to help, but they either were too new, or didn’t seem to care.  Trying to find a contact at the corporate office seems darn near impossible. You see I can email, by filling out a form, or call the 800 number that seems to just go to the dreaded, on-hold music, with the occasional “You’re call is important to us, though not important enough that we are actually going to answer it” message. (I’m paraphrasing their message a little bit)

Now maybe I’m biased because I’m used to the good customer service I get at work. So I decided to test it. I mean let’s be honest I can walk upstairs and talk to the phone support team, since they are in the same building as me. We don’t outsource support since we truly believe that there is nothing more important than our customers, we want to make sure that we support them properly.

Of course I can call support, their numbers are easy to find, and I know most of them for the last 10 years, because we’ve worked together that long. (The actual average tenure is 12 years).  When I do need to call them, someone answers the phone that actually knows something, rather than making me recite my support contract number and offering to have someone call me back that knows something. Being able to talk to someone right away that knows something that can help me, is very cool.

I can also call the VP of support, of course, anyone can because his email and phone number are on the website for anyone to call. Our CEO also gives out his business card with his number to any customer that visits. I’m not sure how often he gets called, but I’d guess not very often. When everyone in support knows that an unhappy (or happy) customer can call the CEO they tend to make sure that everyone is happy.

So maybe I should just accept the poor service I get from the door company and realize I’m just spoiled. Or I can take my business to a company that actually cares and demand good service. If we all did that, think how much more pleasant our weekends could be.