David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

This is a frustrating topic for me and surely anyone else who has ever made a product.

You make a product and release it. You know it needs some work. Nothing is ever perfect and even ancient applications like Photoshop have bugs and can use improvement.

So you put up a feedback and support form, you put up forums for user to post to, you listen on Twitter. Then you start getting poor feedback in really weird places, but your support inbox is a ghost town.

You get feedback like, “It doesn’t work as I expected”, “It sounds funny” or “It crashed”. None of this is really useful. You post back to the person having the issue that you need to know a bit more. You need their OS or Browser version at least. An error message or at least description of what happened would be useful. But then you don’t get one. You tried to reach out and help them, but got nothing back. At some point you think to yourself, “Are these people just stupid?”, but of course they aren’t. Your last phone conversation dropped and you didn’t call AT&T about it, and last time that Firefox crashed you didn’t submit a bug report either.

Part of it is that no one really cares as much about your product as you do. They’ve probably got some alternative and there is little reason for them to invest time into something that isn’t working for them.

Another part I will blame on larger companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft,  etc. Users are so used to their support issues never getting a response, fix or acknowledgement. They don’t feel that it is worth their time to report another Blue Screen of Death because Microsoft will never look into it. Calling tech support is futile and no one who wrote the code will ever hear about it.

So as a community manager or product developer- what are you to do? To a certain degree you are fighting an uphill battle but you should at least put some stuff in place to help out.

• Make in-product bug reporting easy. You’ve worked hard to make your incoming conversion funnels and sales path easy and you should make this process even easier. If users have to jump through hoops they won’t do it. 30 minutes on the phone waiting or having some support page that doesn’t function isn’t cutting it. Making them search hard for it doesn’t help either.
• Constantly link over to your public bug tracker and support forums. Eventually people will learn that they get support there.
• Respond promptly, even if just to say that you’ve acknowledged the issue and you’re looking into it. Give them an ETA if possible, but if you can’t tell them that you don’t have one too.
• Keep listening everywhere. Users are going to keep posting bugs and complaints in weird places. I can’t account for why they do it, but its the same reason that you complain on Twitter that Starbucks got your soy latte wrong instead of telling the employee or the manager. We’re just conditioned this way.
• And finally, show them that you’re not just all talk. Try to get fixes done as quickly as possible. With a new product this often is overwhelming because it feels like a sinking ship that has too many holes to patch. You’re often not the tech person and you’re trying to prioritize the developers who are trying to make new functionality. This is hard and another art unto itself.

Good luck!

Tagged: beta testing, community management, feedback