After my rant and a subsequent email to Digidesign’s VP and GM Dave Lebolt (and their head of public relations) Mr. Lebolt called me this morning.

The intent of my post was to get attention. To be a scream loud enough to be heard from Minnesota to California. But not just so I could get attention, but rather attention paid to customers who paid money for product no longer functional coupled with an internal system at Digidesign not geared to today’s customer service and conversational marketing that I and the market demands.

We engaged in a fairly lengthy conversation about them, Apple, supporting the varieties of products and plugins they do, their people and the systemic infrastructure they have (e.g., their customer relationship management system) and what they need to have and do with it (e.g., interact with customers through alerts; implement RSS feeds so we don’t have to go back to their site over-n-over again to check and see if updates are available).

He also offered to buy back the MBoxPro2. Yes, I could’ve been one of “those” customers and leapt on the offer, but that was not my intent and I’d rather they get the Leopard upgrade out and tell me that it’s ready so I don’t have to go and poke around their site every week. As a management consultant in social media where transparency, conversational marketing and engaging with people who increasingly demand a voice is one of the key tenets of success in today’s marketplace, I have to eat my own dog food and bring attention to something so wrong and customer conversations so broken as my experience with Digidesign these last several months.

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