Friday 16 February 2007

Customer confusion !?@?

I've been searching for some polymer materials for my project and for that purpose I was looking up companies that supply these kind of materials. It's not very easy as this is a very specialized area.

A word of information, I've been looking for photorefractive polymers, now these polymers are used for many purposes including holographic recording, which is what I want them for.

I found this company (Say X co.) upon the recommendation of a legendary researcher in polymer science (very nice fellow and the only person who was considerate enough to reply to my email).

I mailed this company assuming that they are the experts, asking if they've got holographic material with such and such properties. I got a blunt reply of " can't see what kind of products you want to know. We don't have product concerning real-time holographic materials"

hmm...... so I thought of approaching it another way, I used the specific chemical names of the materials and mailed them back asking if they supply that. Next I got "We don't supply holographic material, Sorry I can't assist you any further on that".
o....k...... I wasn't sure whether to give it up or not, because I knew they do research in polymer materials, and that academic person couldn't have been wrong...

I checked out their website but it was simply a mess, too many products and too many technical stuff. So I thought of giving it one last try,

This time I said, I just want to clarify the fact that they do research on photorefractive polymers and don't they sell them to the industry?, next comes the reply "yeah we do sell photorefractive polymers, but not holographic material" !??!!!%@#&!^#!

Obviously, the contact person has no idea for what their products are used for!!!

Well, at least the trouble was worth it, I now have a company which sells what I need, But I don't know how easy it's going to be to deal with them.





1 comment:

Or Peleg said...

Hi,
I am a physicist from Israel (Technion university), and I am also looking for photorefractive polymers at the moment. Can you tell me the names of the companies you found?
my email is:
orpeleg7@tx.technion.ac.il

Thanks a lot,
Or