We just received this letter from Benjamin Katz, founder of CompleteCampaigns.com, responding to our posting of a lengthy letter from Aristotle about our Consumer Guide to Software-as-a-Service. (We will reporting the results of our updated survey shortly.)
Dear Mr. Phillips,
I read the recent letter from your attorney to the Personal Democracy Forum, which questioned the validity of the PdF survey. I feel that Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry did a wonderful job of explaining the value and importance of the survey they’re conducting and addressing the insinuations of ballot stuffing.
However, they could not address the question, why did CompleteCampaigns.com have so many more respondents?
The answer is simple. We asked.
We encouraged all our users to take part in the survey because we think that they should be given the opportunity to voice their opinions. We respect our clients and we know what they have to say is valuable.
Our staff knows that listening is the most valuable skill at any level of our business – support, programmer or CEO. When our clients talk to us, we listen because we know that the majority of our software improvements are client-driven. We think it’s important that clients tell us how they’re using the software and how they want it to work.
So we were pleased to find that so many of our clients took the time to fill out this survey and that they had such positive things to say. We feel this survey is a result of the years of work we’ve spent taking care of our customers.
That said, if you believe that your software and service rank higher than a 2.7 out of 5 and are comparable to ours, I’d encourage you to accept the following three-part challenge:
1) Encourage your users to take part in the next PdF’s online survey.
As any statistician can tell you, a larger sample will almost always give better results. Do as we’re doing and send an email to your clients encouraging them to complete this survey and let them tell the world what they think of your software.
2) Take PdF up on their offer to conduct a scientific survey.
Let’s both provide PdF with anything they need to conduct such a survey. I’ll happily split any costs with you. To avoid any sample biases, we could ask them to survey a random selection of US Congressional campaigns from the past election. Better yet, they could limit their survey to those people who can truly comment on who has the better software and service: people who have used both your software and ours.
Let’s also agree, regardless of the results, that we’ll both publish them on our homepages.
3) Release all clients from long-term contracts
Long-term contacts may be a useful tool for companies such as ours, but they’re horrible for consumers. By locking clients in, we decrease competition and, in the end, lower the quality of products and service we offer. Let’s both release our clients from any long-term contracts and offer to refund any pre-payment if those clients want to go with another provider.
If you truly believe that you have the better software and service, you should see no problem in accepting this challenge. Please let me know at your earlier convenience if you accept any or all parts of this challenge. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Benjamin A. Katz
Company Founder
CompleteCampaigns.com
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