That’s Ugly

June 3rd, 2008 Chris

We use a piece of software called Infusion CRM in our business. It’s a real jackknife of tools that does everything from contact management to marketing campaigns to order management, etc… It’s generally very good. However, I recently got into a bit of a scrap over an issue with their software.

I’d like to think that I have a pretty realistic expectation about software quality and dealing with the inevitable bugs. Over the year we’ve been using it, the software has performed very well even though it has had its fair share of bugs. Most were treated with the right level of severity and handled promptly. That is, until last week.

The HTML editor in the product that is used to handle customer emails was upgraded and, unfortunately, a bunch of the formatting broke. Suddenly, emails that had a certain look had several elements of their style blow-up. Nice borders were gone. Fonts changed sizes. Spacing was changed.

Email is a major tool for us. It’s the way we deliver our newsletter, we use it to deliver offers to our base and it’s a key tool in many of our customer deliverables. So this was important.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am very anal about how we present ourselves to customers. I firmly believe that in 99% of cases, if you look bad or even inconsistent, you will sell less. What do you do look for when you make a buying decision?

Unfortunately, the folks at Infusion didn’t agree with me. The first line support person did look at the style impact to our company’s emails and then decided that the impact wasn’t severe enough to be rated “essential”. I recall from my Product Management days what that meant: maybe the next major release, if the development team has time on their hands (ya – that happens a lot), and Jupiter aligns with Mars…

To say that I was steamed was an understatement. Could you imagine if your printer came back with a customer mailing whose formating was screwed up and told you that it wasn’t a problem and to just deal with it? You’d go postal. So did I.

It was the angriest I’ve been at a vendor in the past year – mostly because they just didn’t get how important it is to look consistent and professional with your image. Not just for some abstract desire to create a particular brand – but because without that, you make less money.

C.

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