Quark has suffered from a reputation of having disenfranchised many of its customers in recent years, but since hiring a new CEO at the start of 2004 the company has made a concerted effort to rectify the situation.
The new dates added to the ‘Let’s Talk’ seminars in London, Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff, and Birmingham follow the same format of a free half-day seminar aimed at QuarkXPress customers. It is a format Quark has been using for road shows running across Europe and the USA.
In an interview late last year, Quark’s UK marketing director Gavin Drake conceded that customer relations had not been the best historically, but said that, Firstly we are getting closer to our customers to ensure we are developing tools to make them more productive and creative and secondly we are responding to customer feedback. Since Quark appointed a new CEO at the beginning of this year [2004] there have been a huge number of changes.
Drake said that Quark has tripled the number of field staff including a 600% increase in the UK team, and re-launched its QuarkAlliance program to enable output providers, training centers, XTensions developers and other partners to work more closely with them.
It opened its first London office in September last year, following on from new offices in Hamburg, New York and Paris. Drake said that Quark has increased its support staff and phone lines by 30%, is attending six times as many events as it did previously.
The feedback from attendees at the ‘Let’s Talk’ events to date has been extremely positive, said Drake yesterday. We would encourage customers to come along to these seminars not only to see Quark products in action, but to talk with us and provide feedback that will enable Quark to build on its recent service improvements and develop better products.
Drake said that attendees are able to see the latest version, QuarkXPress 6.5, in action, as well as the recently launched Quark Dynamic Document Server. The company promises to share its future strategies too. Customers can register for the event at euro.quark.com/en/about/events.
Also at the events, Apple Computer Inc will present some of its developments and discuss why it believes those developments will continue to make Mac OS the platform of choice for the design and publishing industry, Quark said. Apple will be talking about areas such as PDF workflow, file standardization, and data fidelity including color management.
Quark was founded in 1981 and its QuarkXPress quickly became the de facto standard for desktop publishing. That market dominance has been under pressure more recently, as Quark suffered customer discontent and increased competition from Adobe Systems Inc’s InDesign package.
Quark has been criticized for not keeping its software in lock-step with the most recent releases of the Apple operating system, and Adobe has meanwhile benefited from the ability to offer tight integration with its own market leading image and graphics packages, Photoshop and Illustrator.
Quark’s Drake however told ComputerWire that Quark has by no means lost the desktop publishing wars, saying that, QuarkXPress sales of both upgrades and full products are extremely strong and increasing. The company does not break out financial results.
