I got a call today from someone at a completely different state university, which just happens to also have the name of our state in it. They were referred to me by a software vendor who told them I was the contact for the university’s site license for a particular product.
Not only did the vendor have the institution wrong, I’m not even the contact for my university’s site license anyway — in fact, we don’t have a university site license. I am the contact for my college’s license, which is a critical distinction. Today’s experience tells me that they really don’t care as much about me as they keep saying they do.
Most companies have some form of “CRM,” or Customer Relationship Management, software. The CRM business itself is enormous and highly profitable. But I have to wonder how effective the products really are.
This is not the first time a snafu like this has occurred with this same vendor. They have routinely shipped updates of their product to the wrong address, notified end-users directly that product updates were available before shipping them to me, and seemed utterly incapable of transferring the license information to my name when I first assumed responsibility for it. These are relatively minor problems, but they take time to sort out.
One reason for these problems I find is that vendors and shippers can’t really deal with the fact that a university is comprised of hundreds of small, autonomous units. I routinely find myself on mailing and call lists as the “Director of IT” for the entire university after buying something for just my college.
It’s also not a new problem. When I worked at the University of Iowa, for example, my unit — the University Libraries — one day found ourselves in possession of over 1,000 copies of software we had ordered only one copy of. It turns out the vendor’s CRM software could only manage one contact/shipping address per institution, so whenever anyone at the U of I ordered anything from the vendor, they became the contact for the entire University. Some other unit had ordered 1,000 copies, but the vendor shipped to us because we had previously ordered the one copy. The vendor had no record of who placed the order other than “University of Iowa,” so we had to send out a mass email to the campus explaining that we had someone’s software.
I would have thought that CRM’s would have perfected over the ten years, but apparently not. Or maybe companies just don’t use them properly.
