I had an interesting review with a recent new customer of ours this week - which has opened my eyes a bit...
This customer is truly global with near 1000 mailboxes running some 2GB mailboxes, Email Archival and BlackBerry. They are very smart with their systems and we've been dealing with some very technically versed people, and have been undergoing a fairly lengthy and complex migration from their legacy mail servers to our platform. There have been some challenges along the way - co-ordinating their resource and activities in remote offices, with the activities of our engineers in setting this up, combined with the impact to the end users, have given us both a few teething problems. But, we've worked these out and generally found that communication is the key to making this work (it usually is!)
So, I was expecting a few challenges about some of the slips along the way, but when it comes to platform availability and performance, generally things have been OK and there are no worries here... or so I was thinking.
I heard about some of the real issues that have been causing pain to their administrators of the system - those IT admins that make our system work for their end-users. I was to hear about issues that I thought were fixed, resolved, dead and buried - or so I thought... These were not showstopping issues, the service still worked and mail still flowed, but some of the real-time admin data and interfaces used to administer the services or a provisioning action was repeatedly incorrect or failing for these administrators. I heard about one issue that we've been having on and off repeatedly for many months, which on reflection is something that we will resolve for good now.
So I learnt that fixing a problem and moving on, doesn’t necessarily mean that others (my customer in this case) has moved along with you. Reflection is important, it’s easy to assume that a technical fix affects the customer perception when in reality things may be a little different.
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