In the course of my career at Gartner, and my pre-Gartner life as an engineering director who spent giant piles of money on purchasing technology that was often very early-stage, I have spoken to an awful lot of customer references. I’m about to soon dive into the reference-a-thon that a Magic Quadrant represents (we call [...]
Entries Tagged as 'customers'
The art of the customer reference
by Lydia Leong | August 6, 2012 | 3 Comments
In cloud IaaS, developers are face of business buyers
by Lydia Leong | November 10, 2011 | 1 Comment
I originally started writing this blog post before Forrester’s James Staten made a post called “Public Clouds Prove I&O Pros Are From Venus And Developers Are From Mars“, and reading made me change this post into a response to his, as well as covering the original point I wanted to make. In his post, James [...]
Common service provider myths about cloud infrastructure
by Lydia Leong | November 9, 2011 | Comments Off
We’re currently in the midst of agenda planning for 2012, which is a fancy way to say that we’re trying to figure out what we’re going to write next year. Probably to the despair of my managers, I am almost totally a spontaneous writer, who sits down on a plane and happens to write a [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud, customers, developers, hosting, IaaS, networking, research, VMware
Excerpt: Credit cards and EA/Mythic’s epic billing mistake
by Lydia Leong | April 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Excerpt: Click here to read the original. How many merchants that you don’t do business with any longer, but used to have recurring billing permission on your credit card, still have your credit card on file? As online commerce and micropayments proliferate, how many more merchants will store that data? (Or will PayPal, Apple’s storefronts, [...]
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Category: Industry Tags: Cloud, customers, excerpt, mmog, security
Vendor horror stories
by Lydia Leong | June 2, 2009 | 1 Comment
Everyone has vendor horror stories. No matter how good a vendor normally is, there will be times that they screw up. Some customers will exacerbate a vendor’s tendency to screw up — for instance, they may be someone the vendor really shouldn’t have tried to serve in the first place (heavy customization, i.e., many one-offs [...]
The perils of defaults
by Lydia Leong | May 11, 2009 | Comments Off
A Fortune 1000 technology vendor installed a new IP phone system last year. There was one problem: By IT department policy, that company does not change any defaults associated with hardware or software purchased from a vendor. In this case, the IP phones defaulted to no ring tone. So the phone does not ring audibly [...]
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Excerpt: The costs of user-generated content
by Lydia Leong | May 5, 2009 | Comments Off
Excerpt: Click here to read the original. (This is shortened, more than excerpted; see the original to get a full context.) Lack of clear guidelines around user-generated content, coupled with poor customer communications, is a dangerous combination, and it’s one that people across many industries can learn from. One of NCsoft’s (SEO:036570) veteran properties, five-year-old [...]
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You are not dating your vendor
by Lydia Leong | April 16, 2009 | 1 Comment
One of the ongoing refrains of the analyst job is listening to clients gripe, day in and day out, about the things they don’t like about their vendors. Sometimes these things are niggling annoyances. Sometimes, though, these things are rage-inducing, or, in clients who tend to take everything calmly in stride, at least a distinct [...]
Credibility
by Lydia Leong | February 20, 2009 | Comments Off
I’ve recently read Pete Blackshaw’s Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000, which is a well-written, methodical introduction to consumer-generated media (CGM, also known as UGC, user-generated content). I’d recommend the book to anyone who hasn’t read a book on the topic; if you’re social-media savvy, chances are you won’t learn much (if [...]
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Category: Analyst Life Tags: book, customers, ethics, Gartner
The Process Trap
by Lydia Leong | January 19, 2009 | Comments Off
Do your processes help or hinder your employees’ ability to deliver great service to customers? When an employee makes an exception to keep a customer happy, is that rewarded or does the employee feel obliged to hide that from his manager? When you design a process, which is more important: Ensuring that nobody can be [...]
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