How many barriers do you have to providing pre-sales customer support? Even one can stop a sale from happening. Read just one consumer’s thoughts (mine) about trying to buy a product and what the potential barriers are. Have you evaluated your sales process through your customer’s eyes?

I’ve always wanted to test out Dragon Naturally Speaking (a speech to text program), and it’s on sale right now. However, their downloads are by Digital River, possibly one of the worst customer support offices ever. My last time I dealt with Digital River, my experience went like this (and all consumers have bad experiences in their past with some provider):

• Bought the software where you have 30 days to install
• The install failed due to an error on the manufacturer’s side
• Repeated attempts to contact manufacturer went unanswered for weeks
• Repeated attempts to contact digital river are still unanswered
• This resulted in my first, and only, chargeback
• Avoiding any software downloads that involves digital river

However, all Dragon Naturally Speaking downloads appear to be by Digital River, so I wanted to contact Nuance real quick before buying the product just to see if there were alternatives to the download process.

It turns out you have to make an account to contact Nuance by email. And what’s worse, you actually leave Nuance’s site when you hit the contact customer support button (while this screenshot is for technical support, you have to create an account on nuance’s site for standard customer support. And since they are on different sites, you have no idea if you need to create multiple accounts to contact different departments).

Suddenly the trust factor drops significantly, and questions go through the buyers mind:

• A different site?
• So does someone else do your technical support?
• Can I understand the person doing support?

As customer support satisfaction is dropping in many places due to the outsourcing involved, this could be a big issue. And secondly, who wants to create an account just to email technical or pre-sales support?

Post sale support is almost always worse than pre-sale support. Post sales means the company already has money from you, and usually does not support items nearly as well as getting you to buy the product in the first place. So, if your pre-sale support requires this many hoops; what are you imagining your post-sales experience will be?

Suffice it to say, while I was ready to buy the product this morning and test it out. However, after finding:

• Potential barriers to download
• Barriers to customer support
• Barriers to technical support
• Poor experience with their technical backend download system
• A website that auto plays videos with sound (really? That turns off everyone in an office setting)

I’ll wait another day to try out Dragon, or take a good look at some of their competitor’s reviews.

While I’ve rarely ever used customer support for post-sale software; and probably will never need it – it’s the fact the barriers seem so high if I ever needed to use it.

That’s what customers think. If I need this, will you be there?

While most may never need support; if a customer thinks you won’t be available when they need you – then it’s time for your potential customers to move on to your competitors.