January 25th, 2007
Symantec: What do you do?
I’ve spent a lot of the last year working pretty closely with Symantec here in the UK. Most of the people I’ve run across have been excellent, hard working people. There’s a few “less useful” individuals but with 16,000 employees what do you expect?
Whenever I talk to people about working with Symantec they always say “Oh yeah, the ones who make the anti-virus … That ruined my computer” … or something similar. These people often include hardcore IT professionals. Take a look at the comments on this high profile ZDNet blog. How on earth are they going to get past this negativity? If you take a look at the products pages on their site you’ll see they do a huge amount in a number of areas.
You know what they should be doing? Getting out there and on these blogs and forums using the abundance of tools out there for tracking what people are saying and countering negative with positive. Engaging with the issues which are often repeated again and again. The excellent Jon Udell recently interviewed Paul English on his weekly podcast who stuck his entire staff on support so they would fully appreciate customers problems. I know 30 staff are different from 16,000 but there has to be some parrells!
technorati tags: symantec, communication