As I men­tioned, I recently put Primus to the test in mov­ing to their Talk­Broad­band prod­uct and (finally) away from my ILEC. I gleaned a num­ber of things from the early exchanges before sign­ing on for the ser­vice, which I’m very happy with. Yes, I’m prob­a­bly a dif­fi­cult cus­tomer in that I looked to test them early and have drawn some sig­nif­i­cant con­clu­sions from a minor exchange… but I think the infer­ences I draw are sup­port­able. So what’s the fly in the Primus oint­ment? They could stand to learn the power of com­mu­nity, and put some employee effort towad it.
I indi­cated in my ear­lier post about my switch to Primus that one of the sup­port tech­ni­cians had pro­vided a link to some non-official doc­u­men­ta­tion. The doc­u­ments were appar­ently cre­ated by a Talk­Broad­band forum mod­er­a­tor, and I rec­om­mend that the link in ques­tion be promptly book­marked and not lost by any­one who uses or is inter­ested in this prod­uct from Primus. Three obser­va­tions, which I’ll phrase as questions:

1. Why is the link at DSL Reports and not on the Primus website?
2. Why was it com­posed by some­one out­side the company?
3. Why is it more com­pre­hen­sive than what Primus them­selves provide?

Let’s take these in turn.

Firstly, while the forums are part of the Talk­Broad­band por­tal site to which any cus­tomer has access, there is evi­dently no place to com­pile a Forum-FAQ that is orga­nized any dif­fer­ently than a message-board thread. There is only the cor­po­rate web­site, which I sus­pect has an entirely dif­fer­ent process to get some­thing pub­lished on. It may be best not to spec­u­late why the doc­u­ment has to live else­where, but Primus should be host­ing this them­selves even if that’s all they do. The infor­ma­tion would then become more read­ily avail­able to the peo­ple who want it, as it could be made acces­si­ble from within the portal.

Sec­ondly, you can always tell when doc­u­men­ta­tion — say, a FAQ — is com­piled by some­one who knows, uses, and loves the prod­uct… and espe­cially some­one who knows it really well and has encoun­tered many items to trou­bleshoot over time. You can also tell when the “FAQ” is com­piled by the mar­ket­ing depart­ment. The lat­ter is worth­less to actual users, while the for­mer is invalu­able. The only thing that the mar­ket­ing depart­ment really cares about are the ques­tions that it hopes a prospec­tive cus­tomer will ask… take a look at the Primus Talk­broad­Band FAQ and see what you think. It’s my con­tention that the mar­ket­ing use of a FAQ exhibits noth­ing more or less than a fail­ure on the part of the mar­ket­ing depart­ment to get the infor­ma­tion into an eas­ily acces­si­ble for­mat in proper con­text else­where, but that’s another rant entirely. In this case, the unof­fi­cial FAQ that a very help­ful sup­port per­son directed me to is tech­ni­cal and is based on ques­tions that are actu­ally asked con­cern­ing sit­u­a­tions that actu­ally arise and pro­vides answers that actu­ally help. The rea­son is sim­ple: goal of the FAQ is to help, not to sell.

Thirdly, it is frankly unclear why the third-party FAQ would be more com­pre­hen­sive than what Primus pro­vides, except per­haps to observe that it was com­piled out­side of com­pany time by some­one not paid to do it. The sup­port per­son who pointed it out was, as I said, very help­ful and even went the extra step of email­ing me after the ques­tion had already been suit­ably answered to pro­vide a bit more infor­ma­tion that was rel­e­vant. This par­tic­u­lar sup­port tech­ni­cal evi­dently cared enough to try to help when some­thing out­side the norm was requested, and I sus­pect per­haps he’s con­nected to the forum com­mu­nity in some fashion.

What I will sug­gest to Primus, should the board of direc­tors sud­denly call me out of the blue to ask, is that they should put more value in the com­mu­nity, and direct some­one in their employ (a tech­ni­cal per­son, ide­ally) to spend some time in there not mon­i­tor­ing, mod­er­at­ing, or fil­ter­ing, but sim­ply par­tic­i­pat­ing. What­ever the com­mu­nity needs, help them find it or get it. Take the com­piled infor­ma­tion they have and host it for them. Index it, make it search­able, and incor­po­rate it into the site, as writ­ten. Heck, make it a wiki. All this I say with­out even know­ing how much of a com­mu­nity their forums are… all I know is that there is at least one per­son (and prob­a­bly more) in there that care enough about the prod­uct to spend a lot of effort help­ing oth­ers sort out how to get the best use of it.