Calling poor customer service what it is
Last year, at the urging of Victorian newsagents using the POS Solutions software, VANA, the local newsagent association, facilitated a POS Solutions user meeting at the VANA offices. I complained at the time as the announcement did not provide any background as to their involvement in the meeting. The VANA announcement read like an endorsement by VANA. Since then, VANA has facilitated several more POS Solutions user meeting, the most recent this week.
VANA continues to be less than clear in explaining that they are facilitating the meetings because POS has been unable or unwilling to host user meetings in the past. This maintains the air of endorsement.
Tower Systems, my software company, has run regular user meetings since the early 1980s. We fund these ourselves. We have never used VANA offices or resources to facilitate them. Further, we actively support VANA in a number of ways on a pro bono basis.
As a financial VANA member I am disappointed at the implicit endorsement of POS Solutions and frustrated that people who should know better at VANA do not understand that their involvement – even in providing an office and sending an email – implies endorsement.
If POS Solutions lets newsagents down by not providing user meetings, so be it. It is their commercial decision. Newsagents make a commercial choice as to the software they use and that choice should not be propped up by VANA in any way.
Tower Systems currently serves in excess of 1,400 newsagents. My understanding is that POS Solutions serves around 700 – this is based in part on information supplied by POS Solutions to one of their clients late last year.
With only one more Tower Newsagent user meeting to go – Darwin July 12 – let me recap some numbers. We visited 23 cities and met with hundreds of our customers. Our investment in travel, hotel rooms, meeting room hire and the like, we invested over $50,000 in these sessions. We will invest a similar amount in the second round later this year. The most common questions related to user of Retailer 2. We have received 20 suggestions for changes in the software and we will look at these as we consider future updates. In the early 1990s, when our support was not as good as it could be, we would face angry customers at user meetings. This time around, as has been the case for years, we faced happy customers. We’d like to especially single out our Sydney customers for turning up over several sessions – they usually have the worst attendance record. This time around was huge improvement!
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