Data is the foundation upon which great insights are derived - a belief that is held close to the heart for a number of us in the tech product/services space. 

As your user base grows a data capture framework is critical to, a) have the ability to process the sheer volume of information coming at you and b) have the ability to provide some truly fascinating insights - with the right tools & techniques.

However, as a business in its nascency, you don't necessarily have access to a lot of that first-hand data (or all the framework in place to process it). So you make certain assumptions based on : 

  1. Your own experiences (And those of your founders) 
  2. Anecdotal evidence from the world around you
  3. Some secondary research 

.... and then you dive right in. 

As with getting any new business just off the ground, you're completely wired in, your senses heightened as you pay very close attention to every little thing your first set of customers do (or say). If managed well this early phase of customer feedback is a goldmine of user insight that should be treated well.

Ironically, it is also at this stage of a company that I believe founders run the risk of over-correcting when customer feedback is received (hell I've done it more than once!) In some cases resulting in changes that might do more harm than good because they are born out of a knee jerk reaction to satisfy a complaint than as a distillation from a well thought out framework. 

So what do you do when you're so passionate about your product and you receive critical feedback from a customer? 

  • Step 1: Well, I've learned it helps to take a breath. It also helps to assume that things are going to go "differently" than expected. If you train yourself to think that way you're less prone to reacting emotionally to a negative event.
  • Step 2: Solve the problem for that specific event/customer quickly - something that most founders do intuitively. This requires a level of immediacy as customers aren't patient (nor should they need to be). This might result in your business taking a financial hit (if justified) but the focus should be on ensuring you can salvage the customer experience.
  • Step 3: Provided it isn't a systemic issue that has the probability of affecting a significant number of your customers ( Downtime / Product not working the way it was supposed to / etc) you should take a step back and look at the issue in more detail.

For that, you need to know a couple of things - depending on the nature of your product/service.

  1. Details about the customer so you have a context - Who they are, the method they used to interact with your product, etc.
  2. What your expected behavior for the customer was intended to be,
  3. What the customer's expectation was.

For issues that are black and white, where the product or service didn't perform as you intended the fix ought to be evident.

The "grey area" complaints, which have the potential for unintended consequences (taking you down a different product decision path) stem from a difference between (3) and (2) and this is where things get tricky. Primarily because as an early-stage company you're trying to establish a certain behavior or experience with your product. So the key is to understand whether the anomaly was due to a "one-off" error by the customer or that the native behavior itself isn't as intuitive as you thought it would be.

This is where you combine the limited data that you have through :

  1. Analytics tools that you hopefully had the foresight to integrate (flurry for example),
  2. Feedback from that very polite call to the customer to elicit more information about what they did exactly,
  3. Have the same behavior tested by a handful of people from the same demographic profile who were not involved in the building (or testing) of your product so they don't have a pre-existing product bias. This is something that should be critical with every major change in design with your product regardless.

In most cases this should provide you some indication of whether this is an issue that requires one or more of the following corrections :

  • Design changes, so the process is more intuitive than currently defined.
  • Customer education (try to avoid this if it requires "train to use" - you want to mimic intuitive behaviors for your consumer group)
  • Chalk this up to an anomaly (but make a note of it with your customer experience group to see if this pops-up again in the future).

Bottom line, I've experienced that if you treat your customers as a fresh set of eyes on your product, and have a framework to understand the context of the feedback you're on your way to building a product or service that is relevant for your target group (This only works however if you push down that rising feeling of panic every-time something doesn't go the way you planned it).

Which is the whole point isn't it?

So how do you deal with critical customer feedback?

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