When someone says they hate your product
getflack.com
getflack.com
I was working at a startup and we got some frustrating and hostile feedback from a user, I responded by acknowledging the issue and sending them a beta build that attempted to fix their issue. (it did not, but...)
Just reaching out and trying to engage made an enormous difference. They ended up contributing significantly to isolating and fixing that specific bug and others in the future, and referring us a few customers to boot, if I remember correctly.
In some cases, had I had the power to do so, there are a few users who I’d gladly have “fired”: offer a full refund in exchange for no more support.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/02/25/it-might-be-a-good...
A real hater will obsessively use your product, yet simultaneously attempt to find any reason whatsoever to hate your product (or you), no matter how small, and be extremely vocal about it, to the point of founding new communities centered on complaining about you. Should you address the issue, they will silently drop that one from their regularly posted complaints and find or invent a new one. Any communication you send to them will be purposefully misinterpreted and combined with half truths and turned against you.
Some of these people probably have genuine mental illnesses that makes them act like this.
Honestly I have thick enough skin that I'm happy to let them be themselves as long as we can reach a basis of professionalism and get a positive result.
You're right that there are many people you can't reach, and trying is a waste of effort, but I think an appreciation for human dignity requires me to at least make the attempt, and sometimes you're rewarded.
Not saying you're wrong to find silver linings, just wanted to corrobate that sometimes that is insufficient (as far as I can tell, given impassioned haterness germinating for years).
Another part is that we're breeding a society of Karens. "The squeaky wheel gets the grease". The wheels not squeaking aren't getting regular maintenance or care. No one is incentivized to ask nicely but people are strongly being incentivized to scream. To generalize outside software: a loyal customer gets standard service but Karen gets a discount or something free just to make her go away. It's natural that we do that but it's the wrong reward system. When you reward a dog when they stop barking they only learn to bark.
He places all blame on the user, basically calling him a dick again, and re-brags about their thousands of users, while attempting to sound noble.
Truthful feedback is always a gift even if it hurts.
- User is a bit of a dick (bad)
- Engineer attempts to defuse situation (okay)
- user expands (good)
- CEO escalates situation (terrible)
You need to also consider expectation and responsibility. Unfortunately there's no expectation or responsibility for a user to be well behaved. But that's not true for a business and especially a CEO. Yes, you can say it's unfair that responsibility doesn't go both ways but also recognize that there's a vastly different power dynamic.
Same goes for corporations. They aren't real people, and when you act as a representative of one you also aren't a real person, you're taking on a persona and doing theater. If someone says something mean about you as such a persona that's like someone saying that Orpheus was stupid for looking back.
Now this doesn't mean it's generally fine to be nasty to customer support, because they don't represent the corporation since they have no power over it, unlike e.g. the CEO or the board.
A mediocre PR staffer got paid a decent piece of money to find a way to frame ab outburst as heroic
If I reach out and say "I love that your product does X & Y, but it would be helpful if it also did Z", please don't reply with "Nobody needs Z."
Tell me you will look into it, or it's out of scope, or hard to implement, or literally anything other than calling me a nobody.
We have more users than everyone you just mentioned (combined).
No. It does not. It does not understand anything. Stop anthropomorphizing bots!
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness
> The colors of traffic lights can be difficult for red–green color-blind people. This difficulty includes distinguishing red/amber lights from sodium street lamps, distinguishing green lights (closer to cyan) from white lights, and distinguishing red from amber lights, especially when there are no positional clues (see image).
Publication from 1983: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1875309/
> All but one admitted to difficulties with traffic signals, one admitted to a previously undeclared accident due to his colour blindness, and all but one offered suggestions for improving signal recognition. Nearly all reported confusion with street and signal lights, and confusion between the red and amber signals was common.
You really think that people have been debating for thousands of years if colour blind people exist, with no conclusion in sight?
The most famous of these discrepancies is Japan and green vs blue, or why does Jenkins by default use red, yellow and blue instead of red, yellow and green.
So I would urge using something other than colors as an example of shared human experience.
This is the contention with the person I am replying to, they're acting as if objective reality doesn't exist. Humans can think, LLMs cannot.
If you can't admit to this there's nothing else worth discussing, but please don't mind my hands covering my wallet as I slowly back out of the room.
Some of us color-deficient people can’t. I only accept that stop signs are “red” because all the normies say it is. Your point stands, but color perception is not the best example for it.
LLMs do not think. That's reality.
Let's remove AI or LLM from this question and ask if there is anything any non-biological system could do to convince you that it was thinking?
They hate that.
But, just to see how accepting criticism works, it wasn't Dostoevsky who had that quote about happy families, it was Tolstoy. :-)
Eventually, he became the benchmark of their team’s work: “What would he say? We need to fix that. What were his complaints?”
He swears by this and has repeated the story a few times. One of the angriest customers becomes the benchmark for the team and the service. There are no bad customers; there are only passionate ones.
I feel like millenials are kind of programmed to think that the customer is always right (or at least that this is the only stance you should take).
Will some younger generations think that the world is better off without the people who think that screaming at people is OK as long as you are a customer?
The original phrase "The customer is always right" had an important caveat: "... in matters of taste". Somehow boomers managed to forget the caveat and created a culture of treating customer service workers like personal slaves and demanding to be treated like royalty. I don't know that Millenials think the customer is always right, but I do see that the Zs think anybody can be wrong, especially customers, and I love that about them.
This is not true. This is fairly recent Internet revisionism with no historical basis, an attempt to "well ackshually" the phrase into something else to make a point.
"The customer is always right" has always meant, "It's better to appease occasional assholes than to risk ever disappointing a customer with a legitimate grievance." Of course, TCIAR is not a natural imperiative. It's an unproven philosophical proposition that may or may not be appropriate at any given time and in any given industry.
To the extent that there is an "original" formulation, it might be Marshal Field's "Give the lady what she wants," which is (probably intentionally) vague on exactly how it should be applied. (And remember that "lady" in Field's time had some classist connotations that are less present today.")
Listen.
Period.
Sure, you will inevitably run into people who are impossible to please. However, for the most part, the vast majority of the people who have a complaint are taking the time to attempt to communicate with you or your company about a need you failed to meet. This can be something that's broken, not implemented or done badly. In all cases, they are motivated by wanting to fix the problem for themselves...which is likely to fix it for lots of others who might not be as vocal.
1. Don’t engage in public with an antagonistic or upset user or reviewer.
2. The thread will unroll itself, and the immaterial ones will die out on their own.
People watch what you say, sometimes there can be value in responding carefully if it plays well to spectators.
1. The miser: No matter the cost, the right retail price is $0. These folks make up 82% of the market, but are usually effectively irrelevant in terms of revenue. Yet if you sell low-end low-margin products, than these are your customers.
2. The technical: Give them a list of specifications, and leave them alone. These people already know what you have for sale, and probably know the product better than most of your team. Too bad, these folks are <3% of the market, and while they have opinions they also don't matter in terms of revenue.
3. The sadist: These people are only interested in making people miserable, and for whatever reason are always a liability to have around even in the rare event they buy something. At <5% of the market they are also irrelevant in terms of revenue, but will incur additional losses though nasty cons etc. Your best bet is to give them free swag bribes, and refer them to a competitor because they are so awesome.
4. The emotional: These people are the highest profit market, as they are more concerned with how they feel about a product or brand. They don't care much about hardware performance specifications, but rather focus on the use-case in a social context.
One may disagree, but study 23000 users buying habits... the same pattern emerges for just about every product or service. Note, these classes are only weakly correlated with income level.
Thus, depending on the business it is absolutely possible to ignore the vast majority of the market while still making the same or greater profit. Yet if a product is mostly BS, than the online communities will figure that out sooner or later. =3
If the mistake happened, there are only 2 possible positions to take: either downplay or overplay it. The nuance is that whatever you take, your customer is going to take the other one (thus balancing the Universe).
If the bug happened and you start downplaying it, this will make the customer angry, feeling that his pain doesn't matter, that he needs to amp the communication power in order to make you fully understand the frustration. "Screaming will continue until understanding arrives".
Alternatively, if you take the "this is terrible, we are so sorry, the sky is falling, we will fix it immediately" (genuinly, without sarcasm), then it is the customer who is going to take the "Thank you for listening and responding, it's no big deal" stance.
So many places, especially local ones, take every sub five star review as an insult and invitation to argue. I'm actually shocked by the percentage of places that do this. It drives away my business, and I can't be the only one.
Even not replying at all is a better strategy, IMO.
It feels the company (a group of humans) thinks it is better than me, because i am a ‘user’ of something.
Why i think that? Because i edit user profile and groups almost every day and it makes me feel a little more powerful than it should. It creates an insulting (emotional) distance.
edit: wait i get it now
I’ve had a government worker stop processing my request and start complaining about the product I build. Lost a good half an hour trying to understand their bug but we didn’t get anywhere
Personally I'm not a small indie dev but if asked, I would have the same feedback as Aiden about it.
First time I encountered it, it was with an open source project where it was mandatory I think and this agent pissing kilometers of useless crap at each interaction was really really annoying.
But looking at the CEO response, I think that the product might be at the image of its leadership: egocentric.
Like as an user it is just one of the tool like another one for you to use, you want it to be discreet, direct, providing you tldr and no more.
Instead, you get something that will try to get as much visibility and your attention as possible, taking all the space. Like if it was the main and only thing in your software forge.
Unfortunately, not always an option without making major lifestyle decisions (for example, software required by a job)
The guy offered some pretty valuable feedback to help improve the product. Business idiots with ego problems can bury their head in the sand at their own peril.
Interesting choice of words.
SMS text as an option is fine to have, and was good for the situation in which this came up for me - but the delayed back and forth and then switching to other support people who did not seem to know the previous messages turned it into a real drain and I gave up with 'I hate this. done.'
It’s interesting how quickly criticism cools when ownership is taken instead of resisted
Thanks for sharing.