Re: Customer problems -- MIDRANGE-L

Jan

I second you & others that what Anne has done is just great.

Are you referring to the local IBM Branch office?

Ours is like a BP for people who do not have their own BP, and also more a
marketing place than anything else.  Like the IBM annual tour won't be in our
town this year so the local IBM rep tells the user group that he will
organize a van pool to go to the closest ones if several companies want to
send people.  You know, a van pool is almost like a user meeting, coming and
going.

As for the role of your local AS/400 user group, let me put it this way.
Anne's contribution is for the challenges YOU KNOW YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH.
The local AS/400 user group helps educate you about the things YOU DO NOT
KNOW about but ought to.

Our group just had a CE SE appreciation meeting.
We invited the people who provide local tech support & we paid for their
lunch (cheap), then we invited them to let us know what we all should be
doing to help them have less hassle supporting our needs, and we got an
earful.
I suggested to the officers that we make this a regular event.
I suggested to a contact in the 400 trade press that there might be an
article idea here, a round table of IBM CEs talking about problems common to
many customer sites, without naming any names, that are easily resolved, if
they only knew about this stuff.

We had a meeting to review shareware.
Various different people described what their company is using that is either
free or low cost.
There was a LOT of stuff out there that I never heard of before.

There was a meeting on security audits.
The state of art is far superior to what I had realized.

Some meetings involve a formal presentation by some vendor.
We take back to the office literature from that vendor, that might down the
road lead to some of the people at the meeting calling that vendor with a
follow-up potential customer interest.

We come to midrange_L or IBM when we have a known problem, a known need, we
want to buy something or get something solved & we are asking how to
accomplish that.
We get from the trade press & the user group meetings information about stuff
that has not occurred to us, that perhaps we should be aware of, and we also
get periodic updates about what is available to us that perhaps we have been
oblivious to.

Al Macintyre

> From: jmegannon@intekom.co.za (Jan Megannon)

>  Anne Lucas wrote:
>
>  > The iSeries Customer Satisfaction team in Rochester worked with me to
>  > create a "hot line" just for the iSeries Nation community.    This is not
>  > for technical support problems, but for issues such as those I read about
>  > yesterday  and today where you can't get someone to help with pricing,
>  > upgrades, sales,   you want to buy, no one will take your money, etc.!!
>  >
>
>  Anne,
>
>  This is brilliant! Please just answer one question for me: If I need to go
>  through you people, what value is the local chapter of IBM adding to the
>  machines we buy/sell?
>
>  Cheers.
>
>  Jan Megannon.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)
BPCS 405 CD Manager / Programmer @ Global Wire Technologies Incorporated
http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com = new name same quality wire
engineering company: fax # 812-424-6838