Good intentions and statistics

Devon Sowell took a gutsy move and interviewed Rich Welch, the controversial VP of Customer Service at SW. Rich’s responses to Devon’s questions are of the typical flag waving variety you come to expect from folks at SW. Many of them seem to read off of the same script. It might be unrealistic to expect complete candor from execs at a company this big, but the monotonous parade of quotations and unbridled optimism gets a little numbing after a while.

I left a comment for Devon that suggested that we wait and see what the response to the subscription uprising is. To his credit, Rich said that something was in the works, and that it might take a year for it to unfold. I hope they really do offer better options for customers. Remember the documentation flap here on this blog? We were told to “wait and see”, and well, we’ve waited, but I don’t think we’ve seen anything. The SWWorld 2008 presentation flap got immediate results.

Later that morning after my comment on Devon’s Blog, Rich actually called me personally at home. This was the first time he has contacted me directly, other than making offers for a conference call or threats to excommunicate me through a third party. For a Customer Service guy, Rich prefers talking to listening. During the phone conversation he completely talked right over me several times, so I just gave up and took what was coming to me, which was, as you might expect, a lecture about how great things are.

Rich’s presentation to the press at Barcelona was full of statistics. You can’t really blame the guy, I guess. If I had a nice job I’d try to show my boss I was doing a good job too. The information he gave was  a sales pitch of a different kind. Rich seems to be using statistics to justify his job. I’ve seen this obsession with charts and graphs and statistics from other marginal employees in Rich’s department who should be focussed on people rather than numbers. Statistics are at best misleading. I know corporate types are often dismissive of reality, because reality doesn’t help them send the message they want to send, but let’s just see a little honesty from time to time. People who are so consistently upbeat even in the face of reality should be selling adjustable rate mortgages to low income people. It’s just not sustainable or believable.

I’m sure Rich in his personal life is a great guy, and he’s full of good intentions, but in what I’ve seen of him professionally, he has no credibility. I don’t think he understands the product or the customers or what that certain je-ne-sais-qua is about SolidWorks that made it what it is today. I don’t think he’s one of the “good guys” that are pushing in the right direction at SolidWorks. He’s concerned with metrics, not with “customer service”. I wish we could move beyond all of this, but what SolidWorks perceives as customer satisfaction is a delusion that I think is leading the product in a direction that is not very satisfying to this customer.

The 2009 release has helped restore my faith a little bit, but I still want to hear someone from SolidWorks step out on a limb and say the obvious – that 2008 contained more conceptual misteps than most releases, and that they have had to do some adjustment of the plan that let it get out the door. Please, just admit that the sky is blue. Just once. Please.