Usu­ally, that means that an enter­prise takes care of its cus­tomers. One would expect – in the IT busi­ness, for instance – a com­pany to solve (crit­i­cal) issues, to take on prob­lems, and to pro­vide their cus­tomers with peri­od­i­cal soft­ware and firmware updates. In short – it should try to address every prob­lem, even minor ones, in order to sat­isfy the needs of its cus­tomers. In the long term, no com­pany can suc­ceed with­out proper cus­tomer care management.

Obvi­ously, that’s not really true as is evi­denced here. I wanted to buy one of the cards of Creative’s new rev­o­lu­tion­ary X-Fi lineup. Back then, it seemed very impres­sive and pow­er­ful, a real break­through. Well, I don’t doubt that – the card really is an intrigu­ing piece of hard­ware. Right before I wanted to go to the next com­puter store and get me a sound card of this lineup, I searched online for some help in the decision-making process of what model to buy. It was only when I lit­er­ally stum­bled over hun­dreds of posts com­plain­ing about many issues; pop­ping and crack­ling noises made it num­ber one amongst all com­plaints. As an owner of a Cre­ative sound card I’ve been seri­ously dis­ap­pointed by the lack of inter­est the com­pany seems to have in these problems.

If Cre­ative isn’t going to change their cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment or their pol­icy regard­ing fix­ing known issues, I don’t think my next audio proces­sor will be a Cre­ative prod­uct. I can do pretty well with­out EAX but I can’t do with­out work­ing dri­vers pro­vid­ing me with good audio. The X-Fi is an extremely good card and I think it’s very sad I can’t just plug it in and play with­out hav­ing to fear some difficulties …