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Nuance (ScanSoft) "special offers"
Submitted by emiliaserv on Thu, 12/29/2005 - 10:02.
I expect that like me many registered Dragon users will have received a stream of "special" and "exclusive" offers from Nuance for a range of proprietary and partner products. All give the distinct impression that Nuance really cares about its loyal customers and is therefore offering them special terms that are not available elsewhere. The latest "sensational" offer of Systran 5 at just GBP 69 instead of GBP 129 seems too good to be true and indeed it is. It did not take me much time to find a very similar offer:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0009YVDS...
Bearing in mind that this is a "physical shipment", with free delivery it actually works out about GBP 5 cheaper.
My e-mail from Nuance concludes:
So what are you waiting for? Click here to order SystranTranslator Preferred 5 for just £69, that's a £60 discount off the regular retail price of £129. This offer is not available in stores and is only available until December 31, 2005.
Best regards,
Steven Steenhaut
Well Mr Steenhaut, all I can say is that I for one shall not be taking advantage of your wonderful offer, at very least I consider your message misleading and further proof that Nuance does not appear to have a very high opinion of its customer base.
Graham
emiliaserv wrote:I expect
I expect that like me many registered Dragon users will have received a stream of "special" and "exclusive" offers from Nuance for a range of proprietary and partner products.
Darn it: I opted not to get any sort of email etc. and consequently missed all the swell offers
I'm not sure I mind their making a buck (GBP or otherwise) off some schnook -- its probably wrong in some absolute sense, but to me it fits a venerable Yankee tradition! The thing is, it sounds so poorly done that I can't imagine it actually generates much of a return.
Bruce
Hmm, they really do think
Hmm, they really do think we're stupid, I just got an almost identical message that states:
So what are you waiting for? Click here to order SystranTranslator Preferred 5 for just £69, that's a £60 discount off the regular retail price of £129. This offer is not available in stores and is only available until January 31, 2006.
Changing the date from December 31 to January 31 is a real stroke of genius.
The sooner I follow Bruce's advice, and remove myself from the Nuance mailing list, the better.
Graham
I've read the typical email
I've read the typical email scam* response rate is in the range of 0.02%, and if only 1% of responders bite, that means about 1 sale per 500,000 emails. Say it costs £20 to send that many emails, including the executive decision to change the date, convey the info to the operator, and the company coffee the latter drinks and the 20 minutes s/he will spend going to and from and being in the lavatory, and other secondary benefits.
If the net profit margin on the sale of one of these units, the lot of which are probably already depreciated in the company's accounting and are currently occupying a rented storage bin on the outskirts of Jersey City, NJ, is only 50%, that means exactly one sale represents a better than 100% ROI (i.e., £34.50/£20.00 > 1). One sale is not a particularly difficult break-even number!
Tell me you can't find at least one sucker out of every half-million or so people!**
Or think of it like this: The construction guys who harass the women who pass by probably wouldn't keep on doing it if they didn't think it might work once in a while.
Bruce
PS: I really like that animated "jaw dropper" icon!
*I assume "scam" just to bias my analysis towards the low side. In all probability, a Nuance email would be rated higher than random spam by the typical recipient, so the actual response rate would probably be an order of magnitude higher.
**What might stretch credibility is the assumption that Nuance has an email list of millions of recipients. It might seem dumb to assume the same group of recipients don't learn over time from repeated solicitations, but recall the power of a break-even point of 1 sale: The guy who flushed the first 12 such solicitations just might have a new Japanese contact and jump on the 13th such offer.
Dear Graham, I didn't saw
Dear Graham,
I didn't saw the history on this, but if i click on the link you mention i see a price of 123.49£.
What was the price shown at the moment of your post?
It is our strategy to reward customers ( in this case, people who bought at least one SSFT product and registered)for their loyalty by offering them special discounts.
As you can see, Amazon is at this moment advertising a price of 123.49£ ( instead of the recommended 129£).
So, the special promotion we did of 69£ was a nice discount.
On the other hand, we cannot oblige legally our resellers to sell at a, by us, decided price.
They are free in fixing their price.
So i can only imagine that Amazon reacted to the offer we did. Unfortunately.
We value our customers, i can assure you.
Best regards,
Steven Steenhaut
I just had a look at the
I just had a look at the site.
I note that they're also selling ViaVoice Pro USB for £79.
However looking into it, I wonder is it old stock, since it does not refer to Office 2003. It may therefore be the old Pro USB 10, and not 10.5.
I wonder is that why they are using the old Pro USB 10 box? Is there any reason why they could not put 10.5 both on the box and the disc label?
One has to look at the small print at the back of the box to make sure it is compatible with Office 2003, as that is the only indication that it contains 10.5 without opening the box to look at the latest copyright date on the disc which should be 2004 .
Quentin
Reply to Steven
Reply to Steven Steenhaut
Thank you for taking the time to reply, this is a promising sign that I hope will continue.
As regards the offer in question, the Amazon price was GBP 70 and a few pence, however with free shipment it actually worked out about GBP 5 cheaper. When I received the second of your messages with the new date it was still being offered at the same price. I subsequently received yet another identical message from Nuance, but this time did not check the Amazon site. You are correct that the Amazon special price seems to have ended, however it was certainly valid at the time your first message was received. I cannot say whether they changed their price in response to your offer, however if they did they were exceedingly quick or otherwise had inside information. I distinctly remember checking the price of the product within five minutes of your message being received.
In any event whilst I accept you probably have no control over the prices set by your resellers, the fact remains that the offer was not "exclusive" and furthermore the original expiry date was quickly forgotten. Unfortunately, I rarely find that the so-called "special" offers are just that, in most cases the product being offered is either getting old or else the discount is minimal and can be equalled or bettered elsewhere. Personally speaking, I would more likely be interested in say a genuine discount on an upgrade to DNS Professional, certain other programmes (I am referring in particular to non-SR products) seem to be permanently discounted and a special offer from one reseller is likely to be matched or bettered by another the very next day, also because the manufacturer's RRP is one that nobody is willing to pay and therefore remains an artificial/theoretical price.
Best regards
Graham
Hi Graham, Thanks for your
Hi Graham,
Thanks for your feedback.
I asked our E-commerce department to look into this and avoid that kind of "clashes" for furture reference.
I also forwarded the suggestion on upgrading promotion to Pro.
Best regards,
Steven Steenhaut
Hi Quentin, As you may know,
Hi Quentin,
As you may know, Nuance is responsible for the distribution of VV.
On the other side we have contractual obligations towards IBM in terms of boxdesign.
Hence, we cannot call it 10.5.
Best regards,
Steven Steenhaut
Steven, that's a very prompt
Steven, that's a very prompt reply .
Like Graham, I'm delighted to see that Nuance is watching this site, and obviously takes cognisance of what the experts are saying.
As regards adding the .5 to the name, I would not thought it would be very difficult to get IBM to agree to this. It would prevent passing off by unscrupulous sellers of old stock, resulting in customers contacting Nuance to seek replacements.
I have to state, as I stated previously, that I received the utmost co-operation from the UK division of Nuance, and found them very friendly, helpful and efficient. (This was in connection with the replacement of VV 10 CD's with VV 10.5 CD's.)
Keep up the good work.
Quentin
Hmm, sorry to have to say
Hmm, sorry to have to say this, but the song remains the same, I fear.
My Valentine's special is PDF Converter Professional 3.0 at a cost of GBP 55.99 plus postage GBP 4.70, whilst Amazon is offering exactly the same product at GBP 41.97 post free. OK, Nuance is throwing in a free cup warmer cum USB hub, but this would have to be worth around GBP 19 simply in order to match the Amazon offer, and to be honest I don't think it is.
In any event, judging by some of the reviews I read, the product itself seems to have several shortcomings, I am not saying it does as I have never used it, but it is not difficult to find complaints from several disappointed purchasers.
Graham
Despite the promises, these
Despite the promises, these so-called "special" offers continue to arrive and very often "special" they are not!
Anyone who has just received the latest "bargain" of PDF Converter Professional 4.0 for just GBP 55 would be well advised to look here before jumping in:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nuance-PDF-Converter-4-PC/...
Incidentally, the product itself looks quite interesting, in particular, the Nuance e-mail mentions the following:
New PDF-to-Audio Conversion
PDF conversion doesn’t stop at your PC. With the new PDF-to-Audio conversion you can easily save PDF documents as human-sounding RealSpeak™ audio files for Apple iPod and other media players. This lets you easily share your documents as Podcasts, without the time and expense of manual recordings.
Somewhat strangely, the Amazon product description makes no mention of this feature, however there seems little doubt that it is exactly the same version and edition.
Graham
I have just got the Pdf 4
I have just got the Pdf 4 Converter on offer from Nuance, together with another free program they were offering, High Impact eMail 4.0 Professional.
The total cost to me was €71 including some taxes, and I obtained it by downloading from Digitalriver (the Nuance retailing arm). this would be equivalent to approximately 48.28 GBP pounds, or 90.88 US dollars.
I have not yet tried the High Impact eMail 4.0 Professional as I do not decorate my e-mails, but I might use them for New Year or Christmas cards.
However the Pdf Converter has proved to be extremely useful. I have converted from Word to Pdf and vice-versa. The most useful aspect was with government forms which are fillable and printable, but not saveable (I have never understood why, but it must have sums to do with paranoid government security!). With the Pdf Converter, I was able to save. Further, I was able to make changes directly into the pdf's after saving. There was no problem dictating directly into it with ViaVoice.
I have set it as my default pdf reader in place of Acrobat Reader.
I have not yet tried creating directly into pdf, but I will try it with time availability.
You can attach files, including sound files, e-mail direct from the pdf, and probably do a whole lot more after reading the help files. I found it to be a little bit too complicated to be purely intuitive, probably because I have never work with pdf before.
Quentin