Customer Nervous aka Epic Fail

I'm listening to my boss arguing on the phone with someone over a piece of software.

Here's the scenario: yesterday my company had a webinar. We used GoToWebinar (branch of GoToMeeting) to host it. We had everything set up previous to the webinar and the practices ran just fine. We were excited, we were prepped. We came in early and worked late...

This is usually where things go wrong.

The day of, someone asked me to add an extra dial-in number or two while we were in-session ten minutes before the webinar officially started. I went to to add the numbers and after that, I got a message that the call-in numbers were changed.

This would later prove to be a pretty serious problem.

Everyone that came in after I made that change couldn't call in or hear the webinar at all. Almost 100 people showed up. Only 20-30 stayed because of audio problems. It's purely a software problem and I had no control over it, but I got yelled at through calls to customer service among other things. Oh well, I figured everything out and we just suffered through the meeting.

It seems that adding numbers from international places changes a whole list of things that was not in the user manual or on the user prompts in the web or desktop interface. The technical explanation is sound: they manage international calls on one conference bridge and local calls on another. However, I didn't know that the bridges could not be changed in session (not as a prompt, not in the user manual), but doing so had distrastrous consequences.

I explained the situation. The boss man called the company and they explained the same thing. He called again today and got the same explanation. Mind you, however, he's under pressure and stressed and this webinar he planned didn't go well.

That makes people mean.

Real mean.

He berated this lady who called him back from management for about an hour and got nowhere other than a free 3-month trial. Apparently, where he's from, you win things by being louder or more ferocious. Myself and Mer aren't like that; we try to calmly compromise. We overask and pare down from there.

Meredith just shook her head in shock and we stared at each other while listening to Italy and England fight over the phone about software.

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that:

• you can't change things while in-session. set it up before. manually.
• alessio didn't want to do that.
• not knowing these things and not having user prompts that warn you not to ruined alessio's webinar.

That last point was the biggest problem as it costs people and business and several hours worth of apology letters, but the second item is silly and the first item is a bit unusual. I don't have a complaint; it's just a thing that must be done if we want what we want, but at the same time, it seems to be a common thing to assume that the companies (all of which are large and international) that use the software are going to want all the available international numbers possible.

Alessio should have been nicer on that phone call though. He was mean and intended to be mean and he shouldn't have been because it gets him nothing....

By the way, it got him nothing.

Back to sending these apology letters and emails and trying to sort this mess out... after lunch. I'm frelling hungry.