Customer Service – Epic Fail

Posted in: Programming by Steve on February 2, 2009

Yes, the title is somewhat old and childish (in internet years), but the message still rings true.

Ayende @ Rahien,  aka, Oren Eini, was looking for licesning components for his product, NHibernate Profiler and landed on XHEO’s Licensing product.  He was unable to get it working properly on 64-bit machines.  You can read the rest of his post to see how that turned out.  After reading this, I will never recommend XHEO (we looked into something like this a few years ago and XHEO was one of the finalists.  Good thing we didn’t move forward with them).

I ran across similar issues with TypeMock Isolator and received exemplary customer service.  They took time out of their day, with 2 developers, to look into my machine and see why something was not working properly.  They determined that it was a 64-bit issue, similar to Oren’s problem, where it works on 32-bit machines. 

Some companies don’t realize the power of a community if you don’t treat them well.  I highly doubt that XHEO will get as much business anymore.  We should embrace the companies that do provide great customer service, as they are the ones that will provide the best programming experience.