Today we had a conference call scheduled with a client. The purpose of the call was to decide how many opportunities the client’s customers (end users) would have to install a software license before the system told them they’d exhausted their attempts and would need to contact customer support.
Generally you don’t want to give customers just a single attempt, because something might go wrong during the installation process, or they might get a new computer and want to continue using the same license, and so forth. On the other hand, you don’t want to give them tens or hundreds of attempts because that opens the door for rampant piracy. So we knew going into it that the number would probably be in the neighborhood of 3 to 5.
Prior to the call, Ben commented that there really wasn’t any need for us (the development team) to even be a part of the call because in the end, it was a business decision for our client. We could save a lot of time– that’s billable time from us– if the client had this conversation internally and then spent two seconds telling us the number they decided to use. Unfortunately, they insisted we join the call so Ben and Josh spent 55 minutes listening on the conference line (not really even offering input) as about a dozen people at the client site debated the merits of 3 versus 4 and so forth.
I felt kind of bad that Ben and Josh had to endure that, because I came up to them after the call had ended and asked for the two-second summary. Ben said the number they chose was…
here it comes…
wait for it…
Ahh, meetings.