Nice Talking to You

12:40 PM -- How often do you read about a product or service that sounds great, without any users available to comment?

You don't need to tell me. In my world, customer comments are the coin of a rarefied realm, one peopled by the whisper-suite crowd. So when a well-known PR agency phoned to offer a customer testimonial about a new NAS, I jumped at it.

Besides, it sounded great, involving digital photography, tourism, and a challenge to NetApp. What wasn't to love?

For starters, the customer wasn't a technician of any kind. In fact, it was hard to tell what he did.

Why was this NAS picked? Because a consultant told him to. What other products were involved in the evaluation process? He couldn't recall, except that one of them had "Yellow" in its name. How much did it cost? Dunno. Any idea how much was saved in terms of time, operating expenses, or capital outlay? Nope."Actually, it's not in production yet. We're testing it out at one of our locations, so it's too early to tell. And I'm not the technical guy to ask about those things anyway."

My disappointment was palpable. "Thanks for your time," I managed. Secretly, I thought this guy must've been hired by the competition for disinformation purposes. Needless to say, we didn't pursue the story.

As I hung up, it occurred to me this wasn't the first time this had happened. A few weeks ago, the purveyor of a new array offered a top-level executive customer to vouch for its product. Again, the guy didn't have a clue, because his minions had purchased the system without his involvement. He'd never met the vendor and had never seen the system at work. He didn't know how much it cost or what it had been compared with before purchase.

Lessons learned. My skepticism about vendor-sponsored customer testimonials has grown with age. It may be tough to nail down customer advocates, but some aren't worth the effort.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch0