David Tebbutt, who is a good friend of mine but with whom I have no commercial relationship, sent me a distress call last week about problems he experienced with Sage’s end of year payroll 12 update. Essentially, the update was crashing his machine. David is no muppet – in fact he’s a very smart geek. So if he’s got a problem, it’s a problem. Bottom line is the problem was relatively easy to solve but only if you’re geeky like David. Sage doesn’t provide appropriate help.
Sage knows about the issue but it has not posted any sort of message on its forums to help people solve the problem or to alert its community of its existence. There’s no point in trying the manual because the indexing is awry.
When David made his first attempt at contacting Sage at 0840 on 7th April he was told there would be a 30 minute wait. He already had a fair idea of the nature of the problem but needed confirmation. After all, a machine program crash is pretty serious stuff, if unusual. In David’s view, this is not good customer service:
“This is the busiest time of the tax year and they’re telling me that at 0840 it’s going to take 30 minutes of my time to get through to someone on an 0845 number? They could solve this so easily. What’s wrong with posting a message in the forum and making people aware that solutions can be found there?”
Let’s see if they take notice. In the meantime David was kind enough to post his solution on the forum. Sage asked for his feedback which is a mild reflection of the above.
David and I had a further discussion about how Sage could save itself a fortune in support costs if it used wiki technology over forums. But if you want to know what that’s about, then you’ll have to listen to the short podcast (8 minutes) we made where David tells the story and where we offer solutions for both Sage and its customers.
Like myself, David has been around this industry for a very long time. He and I both know Sage and its culture pretty well. And therein – we believe – lays a good part of the problem. Hint – on the main Sage website, do a search for ‘error.’ Then try ‘crash.’ See what I mean?
Technorati Tags: accountancy, client relationships, Sage payroll, Sage_software
