T.C.Electronic is dead to me. I now boycott them.

[grygrx]

Does this include attacks on a company? Just curious.
Mike

Ad hominem abusive will not be tolerated.

 

[grygrx]

Off Topic Posts not welcome either.

 

[trowaclown]

Long time lurker here.

Has anyone stopped to consider that whatever happened here is actually a Principal-Agent problem? From what I understand through reading this entire post, it seems like the Principal, a generally upstanding, well known and respected company with high quality products, has somehow employed Agents such as Eric, who clearly did not represent his principal's best interests, hence the entire fiasco.

Mmmmm economics.

 

[Matt Dean]

I can only speak of my own professional experience in the Information Technology sector, and I have an example that I can offer. Please don't anyone think this is an excuse, but merely an example from my personal experience.

I worked very closely as a consultant with a German-based software company with an office here in the U.S. We used this software product initially on smaller-scale solutions. Costs in the thousands of dollars at this level. There were times I had issues with how this software was customized for use, and I tried to get support from the engineers in Germany instead of the U.S. office which was based in New Orleans at the time (pre-Katrina). It was difficult and painful getting them to respond with meaningful information. Over time, we started doing larger scale projects costing hundreds of thousands of dollars which garnered us more attention. Ultimately, because of our involvement with the companym, we went to Berlin to meet with the folks there. The engineers had a very rudimentary knowledge of the English language, and it was extremely difficult to interact with them in any kind of productive manner. Many of these folks I had conducted email communications with in the past, and while grammatical mistakes always tipped me off to the fact that they weren't native English speakers, I had no idea of the full extent of the divide until I was sitting in a room with them over a cup of coffee (or a good hefeweizen!). I had concluded from our emails that they were obstinate, obtuse, terse, and a lot of other negative things. In person, they were kind, cheerful, and a pleasure to be around. They too where aware of the issues in our past and had perceived me as a "brash American", a feeling which quickly dissipated after a few hours of personal interaction.

I'm just saying, anything can cause this, and electronic communication is notorious for creating the wrong impression, especially when language and cultural barriers are in place. Who knows why this incident with TC happened. The slowness of response is what concerns me here, because even with those barriers, timely responses should happen. If nothing else, a simple status update that a company is still working on the issue goes a long way. In the courses I've had to take on customer service, communication is what sits at the top of the list in terms of keeping customers happy. Even if you are communicating information that the customer doesn't want to hear sometimes. Since that was missing for a while in your case, I can't help but wonder what effect it would have had on this situation had it been used properly, regardless of you ultimately thinking the product is inadequate.

I still believe this this is just a breakdown of the principles of good CS, and that TC is not run by a bunch of **** who deserve to be written off by a lot of people in this thread just because that is the easiest decision for them to make.

This is true... I've been hired as a consultant to help multinational teams overcome their perceptions that team mates on the other side of the pond are "the problem" only to learn that language barriers were the problem.

 

[grygrx]

Never mind. Closed, I assumed too much.