Crappy CRM software and crappy vendors

Software is supposed to help companies solve business problems and properly written software can help companies become more efficient in doing what they should be doing, which is usually not working with software. Unfortunately, companies and vendors don't always understand this.

I joined a company using some CRM software for their call center and part of my job was to support the software and troubleshoot issues. "Um, shouldn't the vendor be doing that?" The vendor, it turns out, was worthless. Calling them in their office resulted in talking to one of a few people so I became convinced this company was three people in India. An office in at least three other countries - I highly doubt it. They insist we check their on-line support, which was running on their software. Half the time the system was down or unusable. Turns out that they don't even run their support site using their latest version of software. Vendor won't eat their own dogfood?

What kind of mess are we stuck with? After paying big $$$$$$ to buy the software and paying $$$$$$ to consultants to "customize" the software, the CRM system limped along. There were bugs and workarounds for sure, but it must have been worth the money. Of course, the CRM software requires an annual maintenance agreement for support. This is also more than I make in a year and for the privilege of having crappy software, we get to be told by the vendor that they don't have any idea what our problem is but they'll get someone to call us back. Usually, we manage to figure it out before we get the call back a week later or play phone tag.

Then we get the nice letter telling us to upgrade to their x.y version product since their older version will no longer be supported. They fixed a bunch of bugs too. Yay - maybe the product is really better!

No. Product still sucks. Vendor still sucks. Same crappy bugs. Upgrade is a pain because all customizations have to be redone with crappy vendor tools. After months of paying $$$$$ for consultants to upgrade system, find out version upgraded to becomes "end of life" next year. So, new version out - have to do the same upgrade all over again. Call consultants back to schedule next upgrade. Oh, but next version not supported under Windows 2003 yet. We have to move to Windows 2003 soon for OS support, but vendors don't have their software working on Windows 2003 yet. Another seven months, another limping product. Same set of bugs, worse support. Vendor broke customizations and didn't document it. Call vendor and get an "Oh, yeah. Forgot."

CRM is not that hard. I see plenty of products out there that do a good job. Many are open source since the barrier to entry for a simple system is low. I'm really tired of fat vendors pushing crappy products and milking companies for all they have. I want software that is open, easy to fix, and support where people know what they're talking about. I don't want to spend six months of each year forced to upgrade so the vendor is happy with the version of software that we are running. I'm so tired of it.

Open letter to Microsoft

Thanks for patching your operating system finally. I realize it must have taken some time to track down the hole and patch it properly and I thank you for spending the time to fix it. However, when we patched our webservers, your patch broke a good number of them. To make it worse, your "support staff" could not fix the problem because they didn't know what the problem was. "Perhaps it's this, or that, try this one." We had to have one of the more competent system administrators get on the webserver and figure out what your patch broke. The funny thing was that the fix we applied to fix one of the applications also fixed all the other webservers that the patch broke.

Did you really regression test the fix? I know that not all the web applications are running .NET - do you? The web applications that broke are the older .asp code that hasn't changed in a while, and frankly, some people cannot rewrite their website every 2.5 years to adhere to the latest guidelines coming out of Redmond.

The first rule of patches should be "do no harm". If the harm is part of the patching process, make sure your support team is aware of it or document it along with the patch. We don't like surprises at 1am. Patching dozens of servers and regression testing them overnight is a bitch. Please be aware that one of the reasons your ears ring in the early hours of a patch evening is because we have to roll back patches and leave our servers vulnerable for some period of time hoping that we (us and Microsoft) can figure out how to successfully apply the patch before the worm authors get their latest exploit out.