Following our CG upgrades survey, we interviewed Marc Petit, Senior Vice President of the Autodesk Media & Entertainment division, to find out his thoughts on the results and what he's taken from the survey.
The 'personal' touch
CGenie: As you know, we recently conducted a 'pulse check' of user opinion around the topic of upgrades for the software they use. Now as you've quite rightly pointed out in our discussions before this interview, whilst you may operate in the same market, there are many challenges that you face as an industry-leading organization that some of the smaller CG companies can avoid.
Do you think it can ever be possible for an organization with 300,000+ customers to compete with far smaller companies in terms of 'personal' customer service?
Marc: I want to believe that having a large number of customers is not an impediment to delivering high-quality service. There's no doubt that as the number of customers increases, the way a company interacts with them changes and can feel less personal. It's not possible for Autodesk or anyone to communicate with 300,000 people in the same way as they would with 3000 or even 30,000. Products such as 3ds Max or Maya have a very large numbers of customers in many different industries, while products such as Flame, Smoke, Lustre or our middleware products HumanIK and Kynapse address a much smaller number of users for whom we deliver a high level of personal service. Managing a large customer base is definitely challenging, but we are focused on making our customer service as high-quality as possible. And this requires new, more scalable approaches. We have been investing in our back-end systems to centralize customer data and developed the AREA, our online community. This site was developed to provide a free service to literally hundreds of thousands of our users (the AREA currently has more than 250,000 registered users). The AREA allows people at Autodesk to communicate directly with our customers through blogs and forums. It also provides product tips and tutorials, job listings and a range of other services. Now that the community is so big - and it's still growing - we've kicked off a project to make it more customizable and personal. Plus, you'll see some great improvements to the site coming later this year.
