I completely agree - and have similar thoughts about "we look forward to continuing the conversation" as a way to close down a discussion (possible translation: "it's lunch time and it's mac and cheese today! see ya").
However, assuming good intent: how would you determine whether they are listening? (or continuing the conversation, in the latter case)
Anything which gets responses of empty platitudes usually means they aren’t listening.
I am a small developer who makes apps and puts them on the App Store and play store (Hacker news client HACK for example). I often get emails from users on how to add a feature or fix a bug etc.
I email them and instead of just saying “thanks for your feedback”, I address the real problem/feature.
Example- few days ago someone asked me to integrate the Orion browser support in my app.
I wasn’t aware of this browser so I googled it, found it that it’s currently in closed beta and I signed up for a beta. I replied back to the user that currently I can’t add it in because I don’t have access to the beta yet, however I have signed up and when I do get access to it, I will test and add it in unless the user can get me a piece of code from the developers of Orion browser which tells me what identifier to use to launch their browser on iOS.
The user contacted the developers of Orion and got me the info I needed. Today I added it in but since I still don’t have access to the beta, I sent the app update and informed the user that for now, I have added the functionality acting blindly and I think it should work but if it doesn’t, then they will have to wait for me to get the beta. User is happy.
Another example- someone recently contacted me for a feature in another one of my apps which I have no intention of adding. I replied back that I will be honest with them and inform them that I don’t intend on adding it in and here’s my reasons. I gave them an alternative app which has that feature in case they want to try. User was happy and gave me a 5 star review.
Basically, even if you have bad news for the customer, tell them the news and they will be just fine. I try to put myself in the customers shoes and think about what I would think of got the typical cookie cutter response “we are listening to your feedback” with no further details on what they intend on doing with what they are hearing.
This doesn’t scale. If your app reaches any level of success, you don’t get one email per night, you get 100. When my app was small I responded individually, but after I hit a threshold I had to use a template response for feature requests just to stay productive.
It can scale, and I'd wager that it will. There is -- or should in future be -- a far larger number of software developers than the number of components that are required to compose the functionality that everyone needs and desires, at high quality and with ever-reducing negative externalities.
That's a good thing: it'll provide more time for review, apprenticeship, mentoring and mastery of individual technical areas, and for mobility and communication between communities.
That's not to say there can't also be pure-enjoyment and hobby software projects; but those won't have the same support demands (or expectations).
Small (or solo) teams maintaining systems with massive inbound demand, significant risk during changes, and limited ability to receive community feedback feels like the less-scalable approach, to me.
That said I'm willing to concede that both approaches appear to work under different circumstances (and may be able to learn from each other).
You have a fair point but I disagree. However I also recognize that I can only be proven right or wrong when I am in those shoes at some very large scale. For now, I do get about 5-10 emails a day for all my apps combined and it’s been easily manageable.
However, the article we are talking about here is about Microsoft, a trillion dollar company treating some basic user feedback with zero value.
Amazon, another trillion dollar company has been outstanding to me whenever I reach out to their customer support chat (I have done that many times over the years). I get to chat to a human within a minute and they help me either resolve the issue or tell me why they can’t resolve the issue. If Amazon can do it, then there’s no reason why Microsoft can’t do it for basic user feedback.
Also are you really being productive if you are sending template response? A robot could do that.
Founder of Orion Browser here. Thanks for adding the support. Please email me (info in profile) if you need to test the integration to skip the waitlist.
Btw I am in the same basket as you - not only reacting on every piece of user feedback, but actively seeking it, like in this case. (using excellent f5bot.com). It may not be infinetely scalable but will do it for as long as I can.
Product release. For instance there is for years issue with C#'s GUI frameworks mainly the lack of a multiplateform one. Microsoft disregarded developer feedback on UWP (it was stupid to propose a Windows 10 only framework at a time Win7 was still dominant and tie it to a mean of delivery - the Windows store). About a decade later Microsoft remembered with dotnet 5 and 6 that WPF and WinForms are the frameworks people are actually using and they got some improvements.
Yep. Kind of like "we value your privacy" means "we don't give a shit about your privacy". I guess the only way to uncover a platitude is to test it. The problem with "We are listening to your feedback" is that "listening" is hard to disprove. It doesn't require any action - they're just "listening". It sounds good but doesn't mean anything useful. If, instead, it was "We will respond to your feedback within 48 hours" - well, that's testable. That sounds like a real, honest, useful commitment. Is it just too expensive to do that? Even for a billion dollar business?
> Is it just too expensive to do that? Even for a billion dollar business?
It's not about the size of the business, but whether this is a good way for them to spend money or not.
Coffee shops will often not get back to you within 48 hours depending on the comment you make and how busy they are. It's really a judgement call, as large number of comments are basically spam, but you can't reply with "this is a silly comment" or "this is an unreasonable request on our time", so it's best to just ignore.
For a big business, where individual judgement is replaced with a set of procedures and institutions that try to encode judgement, they most surely will offer some level of support with an SLA that guarantees someone will get back to you in a well-defined period of time.
But you usually have to pay extra for that, and that's a pretty sensible system, since leaving comments is free and there is no way to know how serious you are about the comment and how badly you want it responded to. E.g. worth paying, say, $10? $5? $1? There is some intersection of supply and demand for real support at which a certain price results in you getting answers, but in those situations where that price is not zero, it's not the size of the business that matters, but the shape of those supply and demand curves. And the size of the business, in my experience, will tend to shift the supply curve farther away from "free", because that answer will be an official answer of the business and it may take a lot of time for the poor support guy to track someone down and get an official answer, and in some cases it may be a lot of work to get that answer if the bureaucracy is complex and knowledge is stovepiped. This is why you see tiers in support, and the time required to get someone knowledgeable is often much longer as you climb that support chain and escalate your question. All of that ends up costing quite a bit to a big firm.
Thanks. That was a really good explanation and covered all the bases. Makes you wonder if there's a business case for implementing a one-off payment mechanism for response time. For instance, 'free' means "we're listening but probably won't respond" while '$1' means "we're listening and will respond within a week". Just a thought.
It would be an interesting experiment, but there are also big upfront costs. I think it might be more useful as a poll to let firms know if they should offer support, rather than an actual a la carte model, because the costs of support are include large fixed costs.
I've been on the other side of this, advocating for our internal support team to handle questions about a service we were releasing. Today there is great temptation to rely on social media, etc, and not have a real support service.
For me, it took over a year of lobbying, meetings, etc, just to get the go ahead. Here are the things I had to do:
- gather data on how important it is to provide support by giving examples of customer issues that need support to resolve.
- lobby multiple managers
- get this into planning docs so it can be funded
- create a dialogue tree for support to handle, with triggers for escalating
- find actual devs (other than me) to do tier 3 support when support can't help
- do regular training sessions for the support staff
- build internal tooling for them to use to help look up answers
- hold regular meetings that I came to believe were nothing more than reassuring the support staff that we hadn't abandoned them.
And still, after all this, they ended up cancelling the project after a few years in operation when support got new leadership that didn't favor supporting the service. At that point I was too exhausted to go back and fight the battle again.
It is expensive to have someone provide you with answers. I mean, really expensive. And no one wants to do it, because the downside -- publicly embarrassing the company, setting wrong expectations about what the person on the other end of the line can help you with, etc, are all pointed at the person in charge of support, whereas the upsides -- "helping customers" -- is not something anyone in the company uses as a KPI. It rarely gets noticed in terms of an individual's career path.
After that experience, I really understood the moat of luxury brands. Being able to be a company that excels in non-tangible things such as quality that goes above what the rest of the market can provide or great personalized service is incredibly hard and beyond most companies. There is a whole infrastructure behind you that must be maintained and great vigilance is required to keep that customer experience high. It's something that has to be in the corporate DNA, in the sense that leadership is imbued with this as a motivating factor that colors most of their decision making. That's just not gonna be the case for a very big company, and certainly not a monopoly or market hegemon.
I sort of agree. Sometimes that is nothing but a polite yet empty response. But people also tend think that they aren’t being listened to when they don’t get what they ask for, which isn’t always the case.
I have to deal with this pretty frequently: Someone gives feedback about a thing and requests a change. I listen, understand the request, explain that I can’t do this right now because it lands too low on the priority list and there are a thousand critical and urgent things that I need to get done first. Then the person complains (to me, my manager, their manager, in a different context, whatever) that they aren’t being listened to.
Listening doesn’t mean agreeing, nor does it mean solving for a request right now (or possibly ever). Making people feel heard without doing what they ask is a hard thing. It’s extremely hard to do at scale and I don’t envy those trying to satisfy UI change requests from millions of people.
Also I work at Microsoft so I’m probably biased here.
However, assuming good intent: how would you determine whether they are listening? (or continuing the conversation, in the latter case)