I’ll admit it. At the risk of sounding like a jerk (actually, it’s a little too late to sound like anything else after keeping this blog for a couple years), I don’t have much time to read other sites and blogs. Between writing here, doing my day job, producing original content for TinyThings, working on a totally secret project that only three other people in the universe know about, and now getting my hands in the MSDN TV and Channel9 pies (more to come on that later), my days are absurdly full. Probably part of the reason my brain is setting off alarms, telling me to calm down and sleep for a couple weeks.
Still, though, I like to check my inbound links on Technorati from time to time. It’s ego-surfing, yeah, but I’ve met some cool people and found some cool sites just by following some of the links.
This morning, I followed one of the links over to Adam Herscher’s site. He was talking about customers:
Let's face it. A good deal of the time, the customer is wrong. The customer just doesn't get the technical challenges stopping you from building her feature. The customer didn't take 3 seconds to just RTFM. And you... you just want to lay the smack down.
And then, on the subject of shitty customer feedback:
How would you respond to something like this? Would you delete it from your blog? Would you just ignore it? Would you succumb to the urge to get defensive and argue on behalf of yourself and your product?
This is topical for me since the past few weeks as a Microsoft presenter have been rough where customer feedback is concerned.
There was, as some of you may have read, the presentation where I received a six (on a scale of one to nine, with nine being the best) from a customer because “There was too much butter on the popcorn.”
That was just one comment of thousands.
For the most part, customers are good, decent people. My gut feeling is that ninety-nine out of a hundred are polite, well-intentioned folks.
That other one, though – that’s another story, and I’ve been trying to figure that one customer out since I started my job.
We provide comment fields on our evaluation forms because we genuinely want to get better at what we do. Deciding how much butter should go on people’s popcorn isn’t part of that process.
I’m hoping that some of you (comment anonymously if you like) can help me understand just what in the hell it is that leads people to slam a product or service, and then leave a comment that has almost nothing to do with that product or service.
I think of it as the “Princess and the Pea” scenario – everything’s just great, except for that one tiny little bump that ruins everything (which it shouldn’t). It seems at times that people expect perfection, and if they don’t get it, it pisses them off.
That’s when they leave the low scores and useful comments.
What’s really mind-boggling is that some customers give us low scores and negative comments for things that we had absolutely no control over. Not only that, but the comments are often so short as to be useless. Most of the time, they just don’t make any sense at all:
– “Too much traffic”
– “More fruit”
– “Bacon?”
– “Socks too tight”
– “Galaxy moving too fast - never coming to MS event again”
– “Godfather III was terrible”
– “Underwear warmly gripping - concerned about fertility”
– “Eight”
– “Bill Gates invented the internet - stay out of Utah, but bring dip for the raisins”
– “Please control weather next time”
– “Dethrone Bethlehem using five stop signs”
– “Please remove embedded dachshund”
I’ve finally decided that the best possible negative customer feedback is probably “Potato Feet.”
It’s short, it means nothing, and there’s no way for me to improve after reading it. It’s the perfect accompaniment for a low score, say around two or three on the one to nine scale.
Yup. That’s why I get up in the morning, travel all day to strange towns, and put in fourteen-hour days.
“Potato Feet.”
What’s up, yo? Are you one of the “Potato Feet” customers?