Is there a change in the air?

It's no secret that I'm not a huge fan of of shore services for a number of reasons, I honestly don't think that an offshore service is as good a quality and offshore services, international time stamps, delayed message delivery and lost messages, etc...

When I bought my car, I sat in the salesman's office and on the wall was an old sales saying which went something like this "the sour taste of buying a lemon stays in the mouth long after the sweet taste of buying cheap deal" - it was very interesting, I didn't get the cheapest car for my make/model, but I've had it now for a few years, and not once has it broken down on me - I haven't had to spend anymore than the standard servicing on it and in general has been a great car, and still is.

Late Friday afternoon I received a called from Steve about wanting to sign up to a service with us. I'd spoken with Steve a while a go about using our service to SMS his staff for their rosters, and at that stage he decided to go with a competitor because they were 60% cheaper, but then they used offshore routes to deliver their messages - a risk at the time Steve was willing to bear, mainly because he thought the risk was negligible, which is fair enough.

Speaking with Steve I asked what the problem was, why did he want to change? "Chris, it's because I'm having to send 2-3 messages to the guys because they are not receiving them, and it's ending up costing me a fortune".

"Steve, how many messages are you sending?"
"Umm, last month we sent about 200 messages"

200 messages per month he sent last month, but bearing in mind that he's sent messages 2-3 times, so really he wanted to just send 70-100 messages.

This is an excellent example of the perils of using offshore services for mission critical messaging requirement because Steve isn't a big user, and yet is having real drama's getting messages to his staff.

If Steve was sending tens of thousands of messages or more, then you might say, well a few lost messages is acceptable, but if on such a low number of messages he's feeling the effects, then can you imagine what larger volume customers must be experiencing?

Admittedly Steve's only looking at the fact that as he has to send multiple messages, that that's what it's costing him, but that's not strictly true, what he's not factoring in is the phone calls he's ended up making to check if they had received the messages, what that cost is, and what the cost of his time is in all o this extra effort.

Unfortunately Steve is tasting the lemon, however he's seen the light, and now at least he'll be able to worry less about landed messages and more about growing his business.

Cheers,
C