I Love Go To Meeting

We had to do a phone-based demo of our Enterprise Team360 software for a large enterprise customer recently. In order to facilitate the demo, I decided to try Go To Meeting from Citrix. In the past I'd used for Webex for web-conferencing with mixed results. However, with Go To Meeting, I was a delighted user. The presentation flowed flawlessly and the meeting participants from three different locations were able to participate almost like they were in the same room.

But what made me a complete convert was this:



At the time of sign-up for the trial period, I'd provided my credit card information. When I looked at my account status recently, I saw that I'm not going to be billed automatically at the end of the month. In other words, I've got to explicitly ask to be billed. Most other corporations automatically bill your account at the end of the trial period. This left me with that good feeling about the corporation and will most likely make me a customer.

The lessons for companies to learn here is this:

* Don't expect the customer to take care of himself.
* Treat the customer like you'd want to be treated.
* Goodwill is more important than short term revenues.

Microsoft and the Tale of Two Lines

Once upon a time in a land faraway, there lived a young boy who wanted to become the world's greatest kung-fu fighter. He searched far and wide for a great teacher and with much effort became the student of one of the greatest teachers of his time. The student was competitive and beat all other students in all competitions. He trained diligently for many years but the Teacher did not advance the student through the ranks fast enough.

One day in frustration, the student asked the teacher why he was not advancing fast enough and the teacher answered "You're not moving ahead fast enough because you've not understood the first lesson of this school." He then proceeded to draw two lines on the ground with his staff. And then explained, "Consider these two lines. If I want to make the first line shorter than the second line, I can do it in one of two ways. I can either make the first line longer or make the second line shorter by rubbing out portions of the line. You have been taking the second approach and have been shortening the lines of others. You have focused on beating others and not on bettering yourself. And hence you have stagnated. Focus on your improvement and progress will come easily."

Needless to say, there was a metamorphosis in the student's thinking and he began focusing on his personal development. He became a better fighter and eventually took his master's place.

I was reminded of this story while carrying out a basic registration procedure on the Microsoft Partner website. Their site does not work with Firefox which is now being used by at least 15% of the Internet population. The support executive guiding me through the registration process had to spend at least 60 minutes helping me and the task still remained incomplete. Microsoft has been so focused on shortening the line of Google that it has failed to adequately lengthen it's own line. The screenshot showing the Microsoft page is shown above. Hope the folks who are in charge read this and learn to focus on better serving their customers rather than on destroying competitors.