Corporate is teh Nuts

We're at the mercy of our higher-ups, as some of you are as well out there. It's inevitable. Unless you work for yourself, you're always going to have someone trying to tell you how to do everything . . . from dealing with customers to which religion's business management model you should adhere to. If the company I work for could regulate our breathing, I'm pretty sure they would have already done so.

So, what is precipitating this post? A little e-mail we got. I'm not going to repost it. That would not be appropriate, but I will paraphrase. The basic message is that we should support trial users on the phone. While this is a dashing and fantastic idea in theory, it really does not work in practice? Why? Because the people that use trial versions have not actually purchased the product. They have it for free.

We're not all heart-less in tech support. We do answer questions from trial users via e-mail. The thing is, in the e-mail that came trickling down all the way to us via our department heads, it says, explicitly, that we have to support the customers on the phone. We can't tell them that we will send them an e-mail to deal with the problem. ON THE PHONE. The little problem is, that, not even our regular paid clients with 1 purchased license of the product get free phone support.

After we've gotten them running properly with their trial versions, we're supposed to tell them that after they purchase the product, that they will have access to the 24/7 e-mail support service and the $19.95/incident telephone tech support. So, essentially, if they buy the product, their level of support actually decreases. I'm scratching my head as I think about the way that I'm going to break that little nugget of delicious disappointment to the customer.

As I stated in the title of this post . . . corporate is teh nuts.