I'm starting to see the sort of direct customer interactions with Sage that will blow up in Pascal's face. This one in tech support.
We have a tiny SalesLogix Cloud customer that uses the remote sync feature. We've been fighting with Sage over why this sync service keeps stopping on the Sage-supported image. As part of this, Sage wisely agreed to credit the customer for its next 3 months of subscription; customer was close to happy. Good.
Just today I found another systemic case of the sync service stopping and opened a web ticket for the customer. Well, because of the 3-month-free on the subscription, it apparently looks to SAP as if the customer has stopped paying, and therefore doesn't qualify for support.
So, what does Sage Tech Support do? They call the customer and tell her that because they stopped paying, Sage can't deal with the ticket their partner filed. Needless to say, customer exploded at the stupidity and incompetence. In the customers' words to me in an email: ""I'm so unimpressed with this company I cannot even tell you.""
I've seen this movie before.
- Vendor has channel
- Channel doesn't sell as much as vendor thinks it should.
- Vendor decides that it can deal with customers directly and get better results.
- Vendor puts under-qualified (cheap) agents on the phone with customers
- Customer decides vendor is an idiot and regrets buying
- vendors sales sink lower
- Vendor CEO or VP Sales replaced
- Vendor pays big bucks to try to repair channel
- Channel has already moved on, and vendor is acquired.
I don't understand why nobody at Sage has seen this movie. Reruns play every few years in some part of the computer business for the past 25 years.