TechWag

: Image by libraryman via Flickr

When you have money, and you have the authorization to spend it, and you know what you want, there are few things more frustrating than not being able to actually spend the money you want because you can not get hold of a sales person.

I am out looking for a hosted/self hosted Video Teleconferencing System for my program at work. I want to work out a way to link some of the educational software we use, and otherwise give a richer experience to students, while recording the audio and video so that other students can use it or we can give the video away for free so that other folks can learn from what we are doing. There is a much more marketing reason for doing this, but in general it is good to show that you are doing quality work, recording your training session is a great way to do this.

I found three companies that had exactly what I am looking for and all priced about the same. While I am ready to make the deal, these companies are sadly not ready. No one on the phone, vapid and old fashioned “fill out this form and I’ll contact you later”, no one to come up and chat with to actually use their software as a way to show that it works great for customer service, nothing, dead air.

I still want/need a Video Teleconferencing Service/System, but in a recession, companies need to seriously pay attention to bringing in new customers. There is no reason that I have to wait until monday or later to talk to someone. Companies need to focus on what they are doing, doing what they can to get new customers, and not leaving customers filling out dead web forms praying that a sales person will call them. If anything is going to make the economy harder to kick start it is going to be companies that are not small enough, and aggressive enough to at least talk to when a viable customer is wanting to make a purchase.