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Bad customers provide value early on, because they basically do free QA. Also early there is not enough data to know who are the bad customers or who customers
by timavr 6y ago
Bad customers provide value early on, because they basically do free QA.
Also early there is not enough data to know who are the bad customers or who customers who are having real problems, they all look the same.
The best way to deal with them is just to be honest: "This is not on our roadmap, yes we know issues exists. Here is link to issues forum"
Public issues forum helps a lot, because if issue doesn't have upvotes or comments, they can reason that chances for developers getting to it is nearly zero.
Especially for anything below non pure enterprise 100k+ per customer, there is no way team can address even 2% of issues if there is even hint of PMF.
Even for massive companies like Atlassian and Unity there are public feature requests that have thousands of upvotes and they just don't do them because it is not on the roadmap.
- plasma 6y agonitpick: If I’ve reached out to support with a problem or idea, don’t tell me to repost it to an idea forum you have, do that for me, I’ve already told you about it. I’ve often given up at that point when I’m asked to do this. edit: agree with the rest of your post :)
- anonytrary 6y agoI don't like this either and frankly, it's embarrassing when billion-dollar companies have poor support UX. Like why is the burden on the customer to re-submit their report? This is obviously an internal communications problem that should 100% be solved by the company, and they're just displaying how badly they haven't solved the problem yet. edit: I like the rest of OP's
- Kiro 6y agoThere's no obligation to listen to user feedback. I get over a hundred feature requests from users a month but I don't even respond to most of them.
- anonytrary 6y agoI don't think anyone was saying that, but yes and no. There is a difference between people telling you there's a fire in your house vs. people telling you what furniture you should get. Bug reports and feature requests should be treated as different beasts in customer support flows. In any case, it depends on what service you're providing or what product you're selling, whether or not the reports are high-value and would impact the success of your business, what the they're about, etc. The onus is on the company to determine these things for themselves. The only reason I can think of for redirecting a user is if you're using it as some sort of quality control barrier to weed out the low quality and non-essential reports.
- TallGuyShort 6y agoSometimes this is done to when they're actually is a contractual obligation. I pay for Microsoft Azure support, for instance. And it's quite common for them to refer me to Github when I have problems using their SDKs, or to just tell me they can't help when the problem lies with a team other than the one that my support case was automatically assigned to. Instead of taking ownership of the issue as a company, I have to resubmit the issue see several different ways hoping to catch the gracious attention of someone who can help.
- timavr 6y agoIt is a resources allocation problem. Support is very linear in nature. More issues you have, more people you need to take in feedback and act on it. For early companies with very MVP products, support can just kill them, because they will spend all day long doing support stuff vs building. By definition their products are going to be bad. On top of that reporting issue is just 1% of work, because you actually need someone to go and reproduce that issue. If it is a feature request, then it is another massive chunk of work to spec it and even decide to do it or not to do it. Also when you post it in the forum, it is way easier to get back to and companies will ask to login support tickets with production accout details, so they can actually go back into the logs and match that data.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoBad customers provide value early on, because they basically do free QA. Reporting bugs doesn't make someone a bad customer.
- mlyle 6y agoI don't think he's saying that. But there's a certain kind of nitpicky person you can never make happy. When your company is young and immature, there's still a decent concentration of actionable feedback in the nitpicks. Eventually it gets harder to mine gems out of it.
- grwthckrmstr 6y agoAye, you've nailed the point. Early on, a particularly nitpicky and oversharing customer can help identify problem areas or get feedback on the product in greater volume than the quiet, happy users. "Early on" being the keywords here.
- bruce511 6y agoNit picky can be fine. Even if they are on a free tier. I have some customers that pay me nothing, and are quick to highlight anything and everything. It's frustrating sometimes, but the product is better for it. A much more serious issue for us is customers who abuse our staff. And these are sometimes high-paying customers. Shouting and swearing on the phone and on site. And worse. We've learned the hard way to recognise companies with this culture, and actively (but politely) remove ourselves. Even if it costs a significant, potential 7 figure deal. The bottom line is that our staff are our greatest asset, not the code, and not the customer - and even one staff member leaving over a bad client is a net loss, regardless of the deal. We haven't fired many, but we've never regretted it. I should also point out that we differentiate individual bad behavior from company culture. Sometimes we get a different point of contact, but at some companies it's a culture where everyone does the same thing.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoIf I was starting a company, I'd prefer to have at least a few nitpicky customers. You might not solve all of their problems, but their over-communication might highlight insightful decisions you could make, that would otherwise be opaque from customers who don't ever talk to you. Emotional, verbose feedback is better than no feedback.
- nextaccountic 6y agoWhat's PMF?
- jtokoph 6y agoProduct/Market Fit