As someone who has spent the last 15 years managing customer experience (directly and indirectly), I’ve come to understand a few things about Customer Feedback:
- For every person who tells you something, there are at least 100 times as many with the same experience who didn’t bother.
- You will always hear more negative than positive (or neutral) feedback.
- Every person who takes the time to contact you is a passionate, invested customer.
- Customers are human beings.
- Human beings are resistant to change.
Those may seem pretty simple to understand, but all too often, software developers (particularly in the SaaS realm) fall into a few traps regarding them:
1. All feedback is equally important
False.
Feedback is important, in that it should not (and I would say can not) be ignored. However, even considering that each voice you hear is speaking for thousands you don’t, certain issues will take priority.
In the case of something like the report of the impending new Twitter Algorithm layout, there was an instant substantial amount of negative feedback that needed to be addressed.
2. Your customers need you
False.
Customers are loyal to a point – out of all the possible choices of products and services in the world they could use, they have chosen yours. You should be honored by that and treat them with respect.
As they are human beings, most simply will not put up with being mistreated. The people who are passionately speaking out need to be shown that you care about them as much as they care about you.
Based on that, my suggestion for Twitter’s response should be as follows:
As this was still not a significant portion of Twitter’s active userbase, the company’s chosen reply from their CEO’s Twitter account was an acceptable level of response to the immediate “threat” posed by #RIPTwitter.
As a followup, I would suggest they reach out to any influencers and power-users who used that hashtag to communicate, anyone who contacted their support about this, as well as any other influencers who may have wider platforms outside the network (bloggers, vloggers) and offer them a trial of the feature while still in beta.
Push back wide-scale release for a few more weeks to get additional feedback from these customers so lingering concerns can be addressed.
Prior to launch, release a knowledge guide (interactive tutorials, articles, etc) for existing and new users to understand the point of the feature and how it is more “timely” and relevant than the current timeline.
Originally Posted: https://www.quora.com/How-should-Twitter-respond-to-power-users-who-hate-the-algorithmic-feed
Originally Posted On: 2016-02-08