Hi All,
Toward the bottom of this post: this post, you'll see a scenario that has been frustrating me for a while. Someone experiences a problem and then, instead of contacting Pangolin right away, they get up on the forum and start complaining (although Lassie didn't complain all that much).
This frustrates me because we want to deliver the best products possible, and we often need feedback in order to do that. It frustrates me that something about our product is causing problems for customers. And it frustrates me that they didn't contact us directly and immediately, so we could solve the problem -- not only for them, but for others too.
As I wrote in the past, we are not able to constantly monitor this forum, and so the best way to get the fastest help possible is by contacting Pangolin directly. Even if I am not in town, I could easily forward any message to another team member who could help.
Within the walls of Pangolin we have a "no complaining" policy. We define complaining as "talking about a problem and not a solution". We want every team member at Pangolin to be concentrating on solutions, not problems. So team members can't talk about a problem unless they have at least one solution in mind (and three proposed solutions are preferable).
Anyway, while thinking about this problem of people not reporting bugs, and not reporting them quickly enough, I came up with the following solution, which I think is quite good.
If a customer discovers a problem with a Pangolin product, and they are the FIRST TO REPORT THE PROBLEM and report it directly to Pangolin, that customer will receive one piece of highly coveted Pangolin swag for FREE (including the shipping)! In particular, choices of swag includes:
* Pangolin T-shirt
* Pangolin mouse pad
* Installation CD or DVD with the latest software, videos and shows/workspace
* A copy of my new book Game Changers (to be released on Amazon.com November 17)
In order to participate in the offer, the customer has to report the problem as soon as possible (because they want to be the FIRST, and thus, don't want some other customer to report the problem before they do), and they have to report the problem directly to Pangolin, preferably using our contact form.
This gives strong incentive for people to find problems, and report those problems to us before anybody else does
, and of course it gives Pangolin strong incentive to produce products that don't have any problems
.
Maybe we'll call it the "Find a problem, win some swag" program.
I don't know of any other company that is doing this, but it seems like a very good idea. Let me know what you all think of this idea.
Best regards,
William Benner