Boise Real Estate Blog

In my usual daily activities of the past few days, I have allowed myself to become annoyed by the usual stuff in my life.
You know ~ things like traffic, inconsiderate people, 200 e-mails a day, computer-generated telemarketing calls forwarded to my cell phone, unreturned phone calls, etc.
I have also been intensely involved in figuring out how to structure an offer for one of my buyers over the past few days.
It will be a somewhat complex transaction involving a 3-way 1031 tax-deferred exchange of an airplane hangar on leased land into an airport lot that has an existing hangar on the property.
The two properties are 200 miles apart, making the transaction even more challenging.
The up leg property is interesting because it’s in a small development adjacent to the Snake River with a 2,900’ paved, lighted runway.
You don’t run into that type of property very often in these parts and it’s a pretty cool deal if you are a pilot and have your own plane.
Anyway, as part of my due diligence, I called another agent who had sold the only two comparable properties in the past year.
Turns out he’s a private pilot too and we had a lot in common.
During the conversation, he mentioned that he had recently lost his medical approval and couldn’t fly anymore.
When I asked why, he told me that he has Stage IV Melanoma with 18 tumors and has only a few weeks to live.
He is frantically trying to get his wife licensed as a real estate broker so she can continue their small brokerage business.
Makes you realize that our daily aggravations are pretty trivial, doesn’t it?
My thoughts and prayers are with you, Jim.

Like many Realtors^®, I use a lot of technology.
One of my tech tools is a Palm Treo 650 SmartPhone that combines three functions in one device ~ it is my cell phone, my PDA, and also opens lockboxes. It cost $500 last June when I bought it.
It works okay most of the time, but one drawback is that it is difficult to place an outgoing call using the keyboard or the screen-based keypad.
So, a couple of days before Christmas, after a challenging 1,500-mile road trip with lots of outgoing calls placed dangerously with my fingers @ 75 mph, I visited the Palm.com website and bought their recommended voice dialing software.
I was excited that I would be able to place outgoing calls by simply saying the name of the person I wanted to call.
It sounded especially cool because the software was designed to recognize any caller’s voice instead of having to be “trained” like many voice dialing software packages, plus it would link to my Outlook contacts without requiring me to enter my contacts into a special database.
I bought the software online, then tried to activate the software with the secret code provided me when I purchased the software, only to discover that the software would not accept the code.
So, I called the tech support number for Cingular, my service provider, and was told to contact Palm for tech support. I had to e-mail Palm’s tech support because they have no phone numbers with live humans to talk with their customers. Palm took several days to reply to my e-mail, and then referred me to a web page that had nothing to do with the problem I was experiencing.
Totally frustrated and angry, I left a message for the assistant to the President of Palm.com yesterday morning.
In the meantime, I figured out how to get the software to accept my registration code on my own.
This morning, a full day later, I got a call from Palm tech support and was politely told that the software was intended to be easy to install and was not supported. In other words, they semi-tactfully told me I was a dummy.
The bottom line?
Because of Palm’s lousy tech support, I will never buy another Palm product. And, I will not recommend a Palm product to any of my colleagues either. Not to mention the fact that a few thousand people will read this post and factor it into their future purchase decisions too.
How many dissatisfied customers does it take to run a good company into the ground when you are selling complicated $500 products and facing aggressive competition?
I have seen surveys that say a dissatisfied customer will tell 13 other people about their experience.
I suppose I’m doing my part to sustain that statistic with this post.
I’m not angry, but I am disappointed.
I will not spend another nickel on a Palm product because they didn’t take care of me when I needed a simple question answered.
But perhaps it was just stupid old me because every time something like this happens, I am told that I am the only one who has ever had a problem.
How long will it take for someone (anyone!) to realize that they can capture massive market share by providing free, competent, responsive, courteous, English-speaking tech support personnel?
What’s so hard about supporting what you sell?