Monday, May 10, 2010

Component Switching Follow up

As I noted in my last post, I had switched component vendors. So far I'm quite happy with DevExpress and the tools I purchased. But I would be remiss if I didn't mention the follow up from Telerik. As I mentioned in my earlier post, the sales rep from Telerik wanted what amounted to a 2500 word essay. I was contacted by Brandon Strange the Customer Advocate Manager for Telerik. He stated that the original requirement was for 200 to 300 words total and that the sales rep had misstated the requirements. In addition he said they would evaluate this requirement in the future on a case by case basis. I think it was great that they should reach out like this to potential customers. Telerik is big enough that they could have blown my comments of and that would have been the end of the story. They didn't and that is very important. Also to make up for lost business, Telerik provide me with a complimentary license, now I have two great sets of components.

The flip side of course is the vendor I left after nearly 9 years of business. I know based on the traffic reports for this blog that Infragistics has in fact visited over a dozen times since my post. Yet they have not made any attempt to contact me and attempt to win my business back or even find out why I chose another vendor. That is poor customer relations in its most simple form. If you don't value you customers enough to engage with them, you should close your doors and sell of your assets. I for one will never recommend them, where in the past I would have. Instead I'd recommend DevExpress and Telerik because they take the time to listen and engage and provide quality tools.

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