Corel has a customer relations problem

March 21, 2012

This probably comes as no surprise to longtime users of some other Corel products, but there’s a small group of owners of the company’s new non-destructive photo editor/DAM AfterShot Pro who are hopping mad over lack of communication with customers.

Drop by the AfterShot Pro forum on the Corel User-to-User Board, and you’ll find customers anxious to hear from the company about when a patch will be released to fix identified bugs and update RAW camera profiles and irate about the company’s failure to communicate with customers in the forum.

Most of these complaints are coming from former users of Bibble, the forerunner to ASP before developer Bibble Labs was purchased by Corel in 2011. After the sale was made public early this year, Corel released AfterShot Pro at the Consumer Electronics Show. The revamped version of Bibble 5 preceded the release of new versions of competing products including LightRoom 4 (being sold for 1/2 the price of version 3) and PhotoDirector 3.

Bibble and now ASP are products with versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms. Many users apparently are professional photographers. Used to timely interaction with company engineers at Bibble Labs in the Bibble forum, these customers appear to be having trouble adjusting to Corel’s under-wraps, hands-off approach to the administration of their forums.

In the last decade or so, Corel has moved from the position of being a developer of new software to a marketing company, acquiring small innovative firms to add to their shelf of Corel software products. PaintShop Pro, WinZip and WinDVD are just a few examples.

If you check AfterShot Pro’s Facebook page, there’s a greater company presence there, and a much more positive impression of the product is portrayed.

Despite the cheap price, it’s likely Corel AfterShot Pro will lose customers to the competition because of their seemingly snail-like approach to issuing patches and updating RAW camera databases. ASP is fast and has the potential to be a very good product despite its use of silly juvenile names for many of the externally-produced plugins for the product.