A "really annoyed" customer

I usually love working in a software company. Everybody has ideas, and those ideas can usually be tested and implemented fairly quickly. Software is visibly and constantly improving. Bugs reported by customers decrease. You would think you can go one step further ? You’re wrong.

On Tuesday, one of our english customers reports a problem. Basically, he can not do ANYTHING with our software. He immediately encounters errors. Here, at the "lab", we can’t reproduce the problems. This is the worst case scenario: customer is stuck and we try to look for the issue blindly: like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Moreover, England is a strategic market for us and this market is really just starting. Our english distributor, Michelle, has been working A LOT on Speechi promotion in the last 6 months and we are beginning to see the first results of her work. It is very frustrating for her to encounter such an issue on one of her first customers. In addition (as if that wasn’t enough, this is the second major issue with an english customer. Major issues are not very frequent, they happen less than once a month so it is very unlucky that this happens twice in England, which represents less than 1% of all licences ! Michelle puts it to Sod’s law (also know as Murphy’s law)…

By french standards, our english customer has a "typically british" reaction. He just has 4 days to build his project and he is losing 2 or 3 because of the software. In addition, we are constanly asking him to collect data for our test (which is a lot of work) because we can’t reproduce the error. Well, after one day of such a bad treatment, our customer tells us that he needs to go out for fresh air and Michelle writes us that he is a really annoyed customer

I can tell you that the word “understatement” still has quite a meaning over there since I have been shouting and complaining internally for hours now, because I thought we were too slow to find workaround ! (I always regret it afterwards but when I read the emails I have sent yesterday, I just think that although I try to keep this blog relatively uncensored, they just don’t fit here – and please note that this sentence is also a piece of understatement).

When a major issue such as this one occurs, one of our developper just stops all development and begins working until issue is solved or decent workaround found, but in this case, the delay to analyze and solve problem took 40 hours and customer is just stuck during that time. Among other nice things, we had to write a pice of software that repeats all customer manipulations hundreds of times before we can reproduc and solve the issue..

One question I’d like to ask you is "what do you think we should do for the customer now ?" Below are two different points of view and I really like to have yours.

Our lawyer point of view

Of course, our licence agreement states we are not responsible for customer’s lost time. Moreover, all Speechi functions can freely be tested in the "Demo" mode so customer could test everything before buying it (obviously, he did not test everything, but who does ?). So sale is legally final and we don’t owe our customer anything. (Our lawyer adds that this is what he is writing contracts for !).

Editor point of view

We are very sorry about the problem, but this problem was hard, if not impossible, to avoid (we know this now that we have solved it). We did all what we could to solve it as quickly as possible (which delayed more profitable short term tasks). We’d like to do something but I tend to hate giving software because I think it devaluates the software, it devaluates the work we do and I know that developpers especially resent that and tend to feel guilty – especially the one who spent all night on bug solving task. We’d rather give an additional licence to customer or extend his maintenance period, for instance.

Customer point of view ?

Now, what would you suggest ?