PointBeyond

There was a time when, after having completed some work for a customer, we simply got a reference from them on the Microsoft partner site. Apart from a bit of a battle with a rather clunky tool while we tried to input a UK telephone number (yes it may come as a shock to some people in Redmond that not all telephone numbers in the world have a US format), it was kind of ok. Customers got an email, clicked on a link, job done.

Then someone had the bright idea of customer satisfaction surveys. So when a customer has spent tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of pounds on a solution, we have the slightly embarrassing/patronising issue of having to ask them to do a survey, similar perhaps to what you might get when buying a pizza online or booking a budget hotel. Clearly someone considers this superior to personal account management. We send out the surveys using a Microsoft supplied tool. Microsoft Outlook then treats them as junk email. The irony of this Outlook junk email filter issue is not lost on the customers. One of mine remarked “What are Microsoft doing sending out an e-mail that to their own systems look like junk mail?” Nice professional touch that.

So we’ve got the customers to do references and customer satisfaction surveys for Microsoft. Job done? Not quite…

Someone decided that the partner finder tool needed to be rewritten and called “PinPoint”. Fair enough. But unfortunately they decided to jump on the “Web 2.0″ bandwagon and ask our customers to “rate and review” us on PinPoint.

Come on Microsoft, stop and think about this. Are you seriously expecting our customers to give feedback in three different ways? They are busy people with jobs to do, after all! It adds to our workload, adds to their workload, and makes us and Microsoft look disorganised and amateurish.

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