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Ask Slashdot: Dealing With an Unresponsive Manufacturer Who Doesn't Fix Bugs?
moofo writes: I've had huge problems with a security appliance since its installation. Specifically, the VPN SSL client is causing a problem for the majority of my remote clients. The company acknowledged the bug, but they are jerking me around, and no resolution is in sight. I tried third-party clients, but I'm wary of using them since they are not distributed by the manufacturer, and they require some maintenance to keep working properly.
I also talked to various executives at the company and besides giving me apologies, nothing good is coming my way. It's been more than two years (on a three-year subscription that I can't terminate early), and this is continually causing me trouble and aggravation. It also makes my internal customers unhappy. How do you deal with a manufacturer who doesn't fix bugs in a reasonable time frame?
I also talked to various executives at the company and besides giving me apologies, nothing good is coming my way. It's been more than two years (on a three-year subscription that I can't terminate early), and this is continually causing me trouble and aggravation. It also makes my internal customers unhappy. How do you deal with a manufacturer who doesn't fix bugs in a reasonable time frame?
One way is to give the public the name!
If you have a legitimate beef with the manufacturer, why hide their name? You might find others with the same problem.
Why not just bad mouth them. If they get a reputation for poor service, then so be it. This shouldn't be anyone's first approach, but if you've tried for over a year and they're not living up to your expectations, then they squandered more than one chance to do better.
You chose your vendor poorly. Hope you learned from it. Next time choose a standards based VPN solution that works across many different platforms and clients.
If your company is large enough, have a quick chat with your legal department. A 3 year support contract that isn't providing you with any value is something that's worth addressing. A brief letter from your legal counsel ought to result in an interesting response (whether or not it results in action is another thing entirely).
And if it doesn't, why the hell didn't someone flag that up before signing on for 3 years of payments with no legal recourse? The problem isn't really the vendor here, its the dumb ass that signed the contract which allows the vendor to get away with shit like this.
Pull the contract, when they threaten to sue for breach then you threaten to counter sue for non-performance and non-compliance as the product isn't fit for use.
If you're trying to get slashdot to finally deal with some of their old bugs, I'm not sure that shaming them on their own front page is the way to do it. Granted, the exodus of users hasn't done it, either...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Here are your choices:
I tend to prefer the third option, although I've registered my displeasure on BBB on a few occasions too.
You may not be able to stop paying for the contract (be sure your next one is better worded, though), but you can stop using the service — as soon as you find a replacement...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Just stop paying the subscription and inform to them upfront that you consider them to have terminated the contract through their own negligence. Go elsewhere.
It's been more than two years (on a three-year subscription that I can't terminate early)
So, you're worried about upholding your end of the contract even though the other side isn't upholding there end? Or did I miss something?
Do you have ESP?
Proper escalation goes something like this:
0: Make sure you aren't doing something that's going to get you sued / fired. Meaning if this is already on your plate, I hope your manager knows about it. Tell them that you are going to be talking to legal/purchasing first about stopping the bills being paid. AKA "never make a threat you can't carry out".
1: Call your sales rep. Tell them that you find their product unacceptable, and you are withholding payment on the contract until such time as you are provided a list of fix dates, workarounds, etc for the product. Be sure to provide a list of the bugs as you understand them, listed in priority order. Be reasonable -- if you have ten bugs and items 1 and 2 are causing the most grief, it might be reasonable to accept immediate fixes for those, but the other ones my need to wait longer, or you can agree that they can be closed.
2: Start lining up a bake-off of similar devices now, to prep when the contract runs out, and start testing them with the people who found all the bugs in the other one. If the original vendor is unresponsive, switch off their device early. It may look like crap from the financial side, but depending on who and what is riding on this bit of equipment, better reliability / less bugginess / etc may have an immediate ROI and it might be worth it.
Other tips:
Never curse, lose your temper or be less than professional. Save that for when you get off the phone.
Schedule an in-person meeting if possible. Barring in-person, phone. Emails don't convey urgency well.
If the sales rep doesn't give you satisfaction, call their boss, then keep on working the way up to the top. Top managers do not like it when their lower level managers aren't doing their jobs. They want to concentrate on long term, not stuff like this. Make them irritated enough and you will have the management chain ensuring you go away because you make them look bad -- but this is the flip side of the "being professional" bit -- if you keep using words like "unacceptable", "does not meet advertised uptime numbers", "does not match your published specifications", "crashes when XXYY happens", you stay on issue. If you go off issue into raving lunatic, cursing land, you lose your credibility and are dismissed as "angry customer", not "that guy who has a legit list of 10 major bugs and who has his lawyer and finance department witholding payment".
Company sells product. Check.
Product has issues. Check.
Company is unresponsive to problems. Check.
Company has you locked into support contract. Check.
Bummer, dude. But what you're describing is pretty much what any of us in the software industry have been seeing for a long time -- the salesman is always lying to you.
Out of curiosity, did you do your own extensive testing and have your legal department put penalty/early termination clauses in? Or, have you become victim to believing what the sales guy told you?
I'm betting half the people on Slashdot have worked at companies where the sales people sold impossible things which don't exist as sold. And the other half has worked for companies which have bought stuff which didn't live up to what the sales guy said.
I'm afraid I have little practical advice for this specific question, but I've seen more than enough examples of the sales guys really stretching the truth about what is real .. to the extent of being quite certain they took the buzzwords from several separate products, turned them into one list, and then claimed they were selling you something which checked all the boxes -- even if there was no way to connect the pieces.
And I've had numerous friends who have been tasked with building something the sales guys sold, only to discover there is no documentation, no resources to turn to, nobody has ever actually done it this way, and there's one guy who costs $4k/day who can be hired to come in and set it up ... if anybody can find him, and assuming he doesn't look at what the sales guys sold and say "wow, I don't think it does that".
So, the moral of the story is ... hang the salesman out the window until he can provide a working system, and make damned sure your legal department is building in clauses which protect you when you realize that you've been hoodwinked.
I've had more than a few vendors after the sale admit that, no, it doesn't really do that, but for our ridiculous consulting fee we can build something which might almost do that.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There's an unofficial yahoo email group for our enterprise software owned by a top NYSE-listed company, we get almost no help from their customer service but when you bring up bugs in the email group (which broadcasts to almost all of their customers) they tend to get fixed very quickly by their development staff.
moox. for a new generation.
If he had chosen a standards compliant open-source VPN solution, then he would not have to sue. He could hire programmers to fix the problem himself, rather than hiring lawyers to sue the company and hope that someday two years from now the problem is resolved.
While I agree with gist of your sentiment, you're making the assumption that the submitter was able to make the choice of vendor. Not all of us get to choose which technologies we're required to support. Maybe a pointy-haired boss told the guy to go with the vendor because his buddy, the vendor's CEO, let's him win at golf.
...Is a major reason the GPL and free software / open source movements exist. Remember proprietary Unix and its tool support in the 1980s?
you had me at #!
... You're a guru, right?
Someone in that company gives a shit, you just have to find them.
Do some homework and start climbing up the ladder using the telephone. No emails for now.
When you hit on someone who's going to help, THEN send up a followup email. Copy your management if applicable.
"I enjoyed our telcon this date, Joe, and I am looking forward to the assistance you have offered in resolving this issue, including your promise t (blah blah).
As we discussed, I can expect resolution by (date) and I will followup by phone (post phone number).
We both want what's best for our firms and your help is greatly appreciated."
If that bastard falls down, climb higher.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Because he might want to have a decent relationship with them? Other then this issue, it might be a great product, might be getting a discount and so on.
Future relationship?!?
So they can buy *more* products with bugs an unresponsive support in the future? I can see why you'd want to protect *that* relationship...
According to OPs slashdot profile, his personal website is: http://www.moofo.com/ He has a posting on there about purchasing a watchguard in 2012, their buggy SSL client, and the ineptitude of Watchguard support. http://www.moofo.com/2014/07/1...
For VPN it's just the same. I've been dealing with Cisco AnyCrap VPN for the last 4 months and our problem - establishing a network-transparent VPN access to a remote share to deploy software without Cisco Malware (TM) hijacking our netconfig - still hasn't gone away. Naturally. The fuss is mostly politics (90%) with 3 parties and 15 individuals involved pushing responsibility around and fussing with bullshit that would be fixed in 30 minutes if they'd actually deliver what we need, but I guess that's the usual problem.
Moral to the story, once again, as has been for the past 2 decades:
Never, ever go with proprietary solutions and vendor/service lock-in for mission critical stuff!
That aside, how does your contract look? Is it Lawyer-time yet? Perhaps you should start playing 'legal-ball' or at least start writing snail-mail solicited letters as to indicate that you're pissed and won't take this much longer. Can actually work wonders.
Good luck. And don't forget to add "OpenVPN Compatible" into your next contracts.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
In America, the truth is an absolute defense against libel/slander. As long as you have documented your accusations, you have little to worry about.
Except for perhaps going bankrupt defending yourself. Being right isn't worth much if you get put out of business proving that fact. Accusing a large company with flesh eating lawyers of anything publicly can result in a very costly lawsuit regardless of the merits of the case.
I think it is normal to start with a "cure letter" telling them they are in default on the contract and giving them 30 days to come into compliance or face termination. This usually leads to something both sides can live with.
In a civil lawsuit, all the filing costs are paid by the plaintiff, not the defendant.
Filing costs maybe but not lawyers fees which always account for the bulk of the cost of any lawsuit aside from any adverse judgements. Filing costs are a rounding error.
If you know you spoke the truth, and you have solid evidence to back that up, then you really don't need a lawyer.
HAHAHAHAHAHA... If you believe that you are an idiot and have never been on the pointy end of an actual lawsuit. This isn't an episode of Judge Judy we are talking about here.
Dealing With an Unresponsive Manufacturer Who Doesn't Fix Bugs?
Dunno, it's a good question. But I'm sure that someone at slashdot can answer it with the same reasoning that they' use to still be apparently trying to roll out the beta design, despite the fact that some of it's own users (customers???) have in their sig, "FUCK BETA".
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
That's exactly the right way where I live. You start with a complaint, then escalate with a letter giving them a last chance to fix the issues. You give them a reasonable term, such as 30 days. After that, you terminate the contract and ask for your money back due to breach of contract.
You'll be much better off if you let a lawyer handle this sort of thing, by the way. But that goes for signing the contract in the first place, too.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)