--- dhbailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> Sibelius also maintains an in-house forum populated
> by their
> tech-support personnel, same as MakeMusic does.
>
> They go the extra-mile and also officially
> participate in the
> out-of-house group. MakeMusic does not.
If you address my statements on this issue, I'll be
happy to address yours.
> The old "prove that you're worthy of our notice by
> being the one to go
> out of your way to contact us" approach to customer
> support? Many
> companies use this approach. Many customers stay
> away from such
> companies. It's a toss-up -- the company never
> knows what it has missed
> from people who haven't gone out of their way. The
> customer who doesn't
> follow that official path for feature requests or
> bug fixes never knows
> what might have been accomplished.
"Go out of your way," meaning send an e-mail? If you
don't care enough about your idea to want to take the
time to e-mail it, then I think that says something
about how much you care about your idea compared to
how much someone who does take the time cares about
theirs.
"the company never knows what it has missed..."
Feature requests generally aren't missed when they are
posted on the forum (and a good number aren't missed
here). MakeMusic does record feature requests from the
unofficial places WHEN THEY CATCH THEM. But retaining
a public policy that all feature requests should be
submitted to the company directly helps them ensure
that they miss fewer requests. Giving people the idea
that their random feature requests made on the forum
or on this list will definitely be seen by MakeMusic
is just bad policy. And one way you make that mistake
is by acknowledging you've logged a person's request
in public. On the forum MakeMusic's stance has always
been that users should submit requests, and because of
this, long-time forum users have taken to telling
people to do this. It's an efficient system.
>
> I would, however, think that a company would go out
> of its way to use
> any and all means at its disposal to track down bug
> reports, rather than
> the "we'll think about it only if you report it
> through official
> channels" approach to bug-reporting.
They do. Do you think bugs reported here and on the
forum don't get logged? Again, it's BEST if they are
reported so that it can be guaranteed they won't be
completely missed. And as such, the official policy
should be as it is.
>
> And if they aren't really bugs, but rather customer
> mis-information
> about how some feature works, I would think that a
> company would go out
> of its way to squash such misinformation and correct
> perceived errors
> wherever they occur (much of Finale's undeserved
> reputation for being
> hard to learn and hard to work with is based on this
> widespread
> rumor-mongering, which if it maintained a presence
> outside its own
> in-house channels, it could work to squash and build
> its reputation for
> ease-of-use, something which it has certainly
> improved upon.)
Very little of Finale's reputation comes from the
internet. As much as I'd like to think that getting
out there and chatting on the various forums and
correcting misinformation can make a big difference,
it just doesn't seem to be true. MakeMusic does keep
an official eye on this. And even though I'm not a
MakeMusic employee any longer, for the past 4 years I
have been out on the net correcting misinformation and
participating on various forums, always in my spare
time. I haven't seen anyone from Sibelius logging as
much time in non-Sibelius/Finale territory.
> I don't know that Sibelius was even TOLD of this
> event, either! Somehow
> an official representative found out about it
> (probably because he was
> maintaining an official presence outside in-house
> channels).
So for all you know, someone could have contacted all
of these participants directly, including Daniel,
without ever sending anything to anyone at MakeMusic?
Or perhaps it might be an idea that started on the
Sibelius mailing list - should MakeMusic spend a great
deal of time participating on that?? If you don't know
the circumstances, don't slander people without
getting the facts first.
> I bow to your empirical data on resolution rates.
> It just seems that we
> hear about a lot of the "I can't recreate the
> problem" responses. I
> know I've had a few of those, even when I had
> outlined the steps.
Please send me a few of these correspondences.
>
> Geico's satisfaction rate, as MakeMusic's
> satisfaction rate, are based
> on the responses to a questionnaire, I would assume,
> although I've never
> received one.
Yes, it's a questionnaire, and it's linked to at the
bottom of each e-mail a tech support employee sends.
The other customer support employees, along with
myself, requested that we start including this system
back in 2002 or 2003, and one of us designed the web
form so that we could make it happen. We wanted a
system that would provide management with a way to
measure the quality of our responses and not just the
quantity. Before that time, management would study a
sampling of our work (and this still happens as far as
I konw), but we felt more was needed to ensure
accurate distinction between our work.
> How else does a company measure
> customer satisfaction? I
> do know that when companies I am angry at or
> dissatisfied with and
> choose no longer to do business with, send me a
> questionnaire, I usually
> don't fill it out, since I would already have formed
> the opinion that
> they won't respond to anything I say anyway.
I don't have statistical data, but my own findings of
this are different. Typically we found that the
customers who were most likely to respond were the
ones who didn't get what they wanted. Most of the
people who had positive feedback (writing back with
Thanks!) didn't take the time to fill out the survey.
We realized it was biased against us, but it still
provided a means of differentiating our work from one
another. And we still had a far greater amount of
positive survey feedback than negative.
> I have gotten far better, quicker response to the
> problems I encountered
> in learning the program from this list. I followed
> every post
> responding to every problem, even though I hadn't
> begun working with
> that aspect of the program, and so learned much
> about the program so
> when I needed it, I already had the answer.
Yep, here you have 4 or 5 questions asked per day with
20 people set to answer. In customer support you have
hundreds of e-mails to answer with around 10 (maybe
more now) people set to answer. Chances are it will
take support longer to get to your question than
someone on the list. I'd say that the official forum
is usually the best place to get the fastest answer
these days, unless you're asking a technical question.
> Where
> are Finale products at the www.jwpepper.com site?
> Not on the home page,
> where the visitor first looks around -- on that page
> is a link to
> download Sibelius' Scorch plug-in. Not either of
> the first two products
> on the Music Technology page, either. Finale is the
> third product down.
This keeps being brought up. JW Pepper promotes
Sibelius greatly because they were for at least a long
time the only dealer in the United States that carried
Sibelius. When I went to purchase Sibelius in 2002, I
couldn't even find it in any of the music stores I
searched in Minneapolis (including Guitar Center and
Mars Music). If you have an exclusive deal on a
product, you do well to promote it.
I don't know who distributes Sibelius now, but that's
the deal with JW Pepper.
> The first product, Sibelius Student Edition has a
> yellow,
> capture-the-audience's attention banner proclaiming:
> The Notation
> Solution for Students!
Yeah, great. And for $60-$70 you can purchase a
program with a lot more capability - PrintMusic -
which you can find even at Comp USA. Sorry, Sibelius
does not have the edge here.
> Read the
> descriptions -- why is Sibelius made to seem much
> better? Is it really
> the world's best-selling notation software?
What does it take for a book to become a
"best-seller?" Sibelius has been making this claim
since version 1.x when it wasn't even known in the
United States. They obviously have never felt the term
can only apply to the product that has sold the best.
I don't claim that they are lying because I don't
claim to really understand the term "best-selling."
> If Sibelius' claim is true, MakeMusic have already
> lost the battle and
> the war. If the claim isn't true, MakeMusic should
> be fighting back in
> public!
MakeMusic could come back from being behind and win
this. They're not behind, and I don't see them falling
behind, but saying that anything would be over is just
guess work. I don't know what the future has in store,
but I know that there are major innovations left to be
seen that can impact everything. SmartMusic
subscriptions from March 2004 to March 2005 jumped
from 22,100 to 37,500. They are growing at a faster
rate every year. This isn't a business I'd care to bet
against right now.
Let's see where things are at a few years from now and
then come back to this.
Tyler
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