If you work for a small or medium business, someone in your office needs to buy things.\u00a0\u00a0 Paperclips, computers, mailing envelopes, office furniture, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 If you work for a small or medium research lab, someone in your office needs to buy these same things, but someone also needs to buy more unusual stuff.\u00a0\u00a0 Twenty pounds of modeling clay.\u00a0\u00a0 A Sony Aibo.\u00a0 Make that two.\u00a0\u00a0 Lots of different types of video encoding software and hardware.\u00a0 Stuff like that.<\/p>\n
At our research lab, I am often the person who does the actual purchasing of the strange items. \u00a0 If I’m buying a computer from HP, I expect the process to be pretty straightforward.\u00a0\u00a0 If I’m buying industrial laser elements from Bob’s House-o’-Lasers, I expect complications.\u00a0 Reality is often the other way around.\u00a0 Since I’ve been doing this since the mid 1990’s, I’ve seen how technology has often made it easier and sometimes much harder to buy things, use things, and deal with problems.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m going to describe a few examples in this and later posts.\u00a0 Just a warning that my bias is somewhat anti-technology – I joke that I’m a neo-luddite.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A few years back, we were supporting one of our sister organizations.\u00a0 They had an old Japanese language version of database software that was called Prophet or Oracle or Augur or something like that.\u00a0\u00a0 Let’s call it Augur.\u00a0\u00a0 We wanted to better understand some of the pressing issues, and also to better understand how the software worked, so we decided to buy several single-server copies of their database software.\u00a0 This was going to be a $2000 order or so.\u00a0 A small order, but if the IT team gets used to and likes a piece of software, it tends to get installed and used for more things.<\/p>\n
I don’t like talking to salespeople very much, so I was pleased that they had an online store.\u00a0\u00a0 I entered my order for five copies, filled in all the crazy fields, and submitted my order.\u00a0\u00a0 It gave me an error message indicating that I wasn’t authorized to buy Augur software.\u00a0\u00a0 All of their online help didn’t help much.<\/p>\n
I called their sales number, assuming that customer support wasn’t quite the right number, since I wasn’t quite a customer yet.\u00a0\u00a0 The nice person on the other end told me that for an order like this, they couldn’t sell to me directly and that I should use the online store.\u00a0\u00a0 I explained that I tried.\u00a0\u00a0 So they transferred me to pre-sales support.\u00a0 Okay.\u00a0\u00a0 I explained again.\u00a0\u00a0 They transferred me to customer support.\u00a0\u00a0 I explained again.\u00a0 After a bit of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database searching on their end, they identified the problem.\u00a0\u00a0 It seems that about ten years prior, someone at my company had downloaded a trial version of the database software.\u00a0\u00a0 In order to do so, they had to identify themselves as the Site Administrator.\u00a0\u00a0 Their delphic online store database required that all further purchases (even though there wasn’t an initial purchase) be made by or be authorized by the Site Administrator.\u00a0\u00a0 Who had departed for other pastures long ago.<\/p>\n
Hooray!\u00a0 Problem found.\u00a0\u00a0 So how did we solve it?\u00a0\u00a0 We didn’t.\u00a0\u00a0 They couldn’t sell their product at such a small scale over the phone.\u00a0 I had to use the online store.\u00a0 The store wouldn’t let me.\u00a0\u00a0 They couldn’t change our Site Administrator.\u00a0\u00a0 Only the Site Administrator could do that using their password, which could only be changed by knowing the old password.\u00a0\u00a0 A bit of mail forwarding allowed me to get the emails asking for approval of the purchase, which I didn’t have the password to do.<\/p>\n
I gave up.\u00a0\u00a0 Never did buy the software.\u00a0\u00a0 Could I do so now?\u00a0\u00a0 Probably.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m sure that if I called, they now could make me be the Site Administrator.\u00a0 Or there would be an easy “I forgot my password” link.\u00a0 Or maybe I just got the wrong customer service person, who didn’t know how to solve this problem and if I had called again I’d get what I needed.<\/p>\n
So was this a customer service problem?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Was this a software problem?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0\u00a0 Did they just not care about a $2000 order? \u00a0 Probably.\u00a0\u00a0 Did a a database company lose a sale because of a web page \/ database issue?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Do I tell people never to buy that company’s database products unless they have to?\u00a0 You bet.\u00a0 Since I have written a few papers about databases, it may even be the case that some people listen to me.<\/p>\n
Nah.<\/p>\n
I wonder what other strange items are stored in CRM databases?\u00a0 What do companies “remember” about your company, your phone number, your email address, and your street address that come from long ago and maybe don’t have anything to do with you?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I have a few more stories of databases that don’t forget, plus other unintended consequences of technology, but I’ll save them for later posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you work for a small or medium business, someone in your office needs to buy things.\u00a0\u00a0 Paperclips, computers, mailing envelopes, office furniture, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 If you work for a small or medium research lab, someone in your office needs to buy these same things, but someone also needs to buy more unusual stuff.\u00a0\u00a0 Twenty pounds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48991,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[58],"tags":[223,45],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4287"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/48991"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4287"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4324,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4287\/revisions\/4324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}