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Challenges And Strategy - Usability And SupportChallenges And Strategy - Usability And Support
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Subjects > Computers > Microsoft > Challenges and Strategy By Bill Gates
USABILITY/SUPPORT: If there is any area we have not paid enough attention to it is usability/support. It is really embarrassing that people have to wait so long on the phone to talk to us about problems in our products. The number of customers who get bad impression because of this must number in the millions worldwide. Why weren't we hiring at full speed and picking a new site every day for the last three years? Why did people keep talking about support as a profit center? The creation of support as a channel hid its costs >from the product groups. As CEO I take full responsiblity for these mistakes. Our products can be far more usable and the product groups are focusing on this opportunity -- particularly the Windows and Windows applications groups. We will spend what it takes to have the best support (without an 800 number). I think we can cut the number of phone calls generated by our products to less than half of what it is today and use training and technology to cut the length of the phone calls. However, we shouldn't assume this in our plans to solve the problem. Excel 3, Win Word 2 and our BBU products have started to move us in the right direction. Hopefully Windows 3.1 will generate a lot less calls. The bandwidth of communications between the product groups and PSS is going up dramatically, but there is still lots of room for creativity. I insist that we are able to use our quality of support as a sales tool. Surveys like the J.D. Powers survey done on cars will become important -- asking people: How many times were you confused? How many times did you have to call? How good was the service you received? Fixing this problem will cost us a lot of profits and we should make that clear to analysis. With this problem fixed we can really start building some lifetime customers. Only really usable software can be used by the "rest of the people who have not bought PCs", so making software more usable expands the market. Likewise it is the usability of software that will determine how many people decide to use only a WORKS-like product or move up to a larger package and it will determine how many large packages they can easily work with. Usability is incredible stuff -- once it is designed it is easy to implement, saves money, wins market share, makes customers happy and lets them buy more expensive software!
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