Lessons learned from a bad experience

When businesses become customers of other businesses, the interactions between the companies can be very instructive, providing each company with “how to” lessons, and many times with “how not to” lessons.

I recently made the decision to move our firm’s software and data files to a “hosted” server environment. In layman terms, we moved all our mission critical software and data files off site to be accessed only through using the internet. Each morning Potts & Company personnel come into the office, sit in front of their computer, click an orange and white icon on our monitor that is titled Potts Virtual Desktop, wait a few seconds then “presto”, we begin working with software and data files located in a secure facility in Virginia with a backup in a secure facility in Colorado. The service is a little pricey but the promised benefits when achieved should be worth it.

Our relationship with this particular technology company was the result of a referral by a friend and fellow CPA in Alaska with a firm of similar size and structure. She had been one of their customers for about six months and praised their services. She had been referred to the company by another friend of ours with an office in Boulder, Colorado who had also been successfully using the same company to host his server for over a year. I felt very comfortable calling the company to begin the process of onboarding our technology needs.

After the first call I was feeling even more confident. The issues that were the most important to me, experience with our industry specific software, data security, processing speed, the ability to work remotely, and timely support, all those things were issues the company had experience with and had mastered. A contract was emailed, signed and returned, and we were transferred from their sales staff to their operations people where a support team began working with us to prepare to migrate our software and data from our local server to their hosted server. At this point everything was bliss. Every question we tendered was answered with either, “sure we can do that” or “no problem.” Expectations were set, high expectations.

The first step in the migration was to setup a virtual desktop with all of our software for the purpose of testing that everything worked as promised. Our office administrator spent many hours testing the software to see that everything worked as expected. It wasn’t perfect but their system engineers tweaked a few glitches that satisfied our office administrator that we were ready to migrate our data to the hosted server and “go live.” The date to migrate was set.

The migration of our data files to their servers was supposed to take place over a weekend and Monday morning our office would be up and running with the promise of a great future, the natural consequence of a significant investment in technology.

Monday morning arrived and a line began to form at my office door and the first thing I noticed was the uncharacteristic lack of a smile from my co-workers. They were not able to print, they were not able to scan, error messages popped up when software was opened, they couldn’t access their USB ports on their local desktops needed to upload new digital files required to work on promised work, and etc., etc., etc.

These complaints continued through Friday. ALL expectations set in my discussions with the technology company’s sales person and migration team were slaughtered.

Monday morning had begun with me both agitated and in a poor frame of mind. The agitation continued throughout the week. Finally, the next Monday morning I felt it was time to share my agitation with others. I called my initial point of contact with the technology company and had a very “unproductive” conversation. I’ll accept the blame for using hateful language first. To his credit, he still answers my calls.

Lesson #1: Business owners, managers, and rank and file employees all need to be cognizant and sensitive to the expectations they set for their customers on how their company will deliver. Be careful what you say. Even casual conversation can assist in setting a customer’s expectations.

The reason my co-workers were upset and frustrated was because our software that worked without a flaw last week now was an obstacle to completing their work. I had been promoting the change as an upgrade to their workflow and in doing so I had set their expectations and these expectations did not materialize. The reason I made an unfriendly call the following week and spoke to the sales person outside the bounds of civility was because he helped set my expectations high and the inherent promise in those expectations seemed to be broken.

Lesson #2: Just because you say it in English doesn’t mean your customer will accurately perceive what you said. More importantly, if you fail to attend to what your customer tells you without adequate thought, you may misdiagnose the source of their pain. Clarity in your communications with your customer is very important and it takes effort. It should be the priority in managing your client relationships.

The expectations that were not met the first Monday morning were MY expectations. More accurately stated, the failed expectations were my PERCEIVED expectations. Some of my perceptions may have been misperceived, but in my point of view that didn’t absolve their company’s representatives in their failure to listen with enough attention to understand our issues. It seemed their primary goal was to deflect personal blame.

The misery continued as the migration team worked hard to solve our problems based on their assumptions about the problem, but generally failed because they failed to listen with purpose to understand our work flow. Finally the migration team themselves migrated elsewhere and we were turned over to the day to day support department.

Lesson #3: Be careful how and who answers questions asked by your customers. It could affect the perception of your competence.

When our firm has an issue and needs technical support, we are asked to submit the question or request by email unless it is urgent. Since our issues have been frequent, we have submitted many requests to support. Many of our requests have been duplicated, i.e., different users in our company experiencing the same problem without knowledge their co-worker has experienced the same problem and both have submitted a support request for the same problem.

This same request, though duplicated, has resulted in different system engineers working on the same problem. Each engineer seems to have a different solutions and when one fixes the problem his way the solution is a different solution than the other engineer. There have been times I have been concerned about their competence. But the most common trait in their answers is that they appear to be an answer that works for their convenience. They ask us to change our workflow to make the problem go away. My problem is that this same software worked almost flawlessly when it was installed on our own servers, a credit to our local technology support providers.

It has been about five weeks since we migrated to our hosted servers. Life is calmer but not tranquil. Over the five weeks we have been using our hosted server, the great majority of problems seem to have been resolved. There are just a couple of stubborn issues that still need to be resolved. Last week we made it to the top of their pile and I was able to have a conversation with their chief information officer. He promised to fix our issues. I choose to believe him. If it doesn’t work, there is always Plan B.

Potts & Company has greatly benefited and learned from this experience. The lesson was unanticipated, but useful knowledge was gained. This knowledge was not about technology but was about managing a client or customer relationship. And we learned many lessons. As a firm we have recommitted to making our conversations with our clients about their needs and setting realistic expectation is their minds. We are emphasizing the need to look beyond the first or easiest answer to their questions and to find the best answer each time a question is asked. Attention and clarity in conversations with each client are skills to be practiced daily.

Ideas to improve your business are presented to you frequently, maybe daily. If you don’t prepare your mind to see these opportunities the will be missed. Keep in mind one of the best ways to learn is from other people’s troubles. Just don’t be foolish and fail to learn from your own aggravations.