On Customers
Customers are the lifeblood of a business. They purchase our creations, our services, our tools, our art, our products.
In their best moments, they move beyond the task of purchasing and help us make our creations better through feedback.
- Feedback from customers is more often than not productive. When customers deliver feedback productively, they successfully open our eyes and minds to the adjacent possible by imploring us to see what our creations could and can be.
- Sometimes, though, customers can do damage to businesses with reviews and criticisms that devolve from feedback (which is a gift) into insults, false accusations, even libel.
Because they don’t have sales teams to drive their products to market, product-led companies are made or broken by an in-app customer experience that results in social proof, word-of-mouth, and product reviews in various app stores and review channels.
Inevitably, customers will leave public reviews of your app that are neither fair nor accurate, and when this happens, it can be challenging to put aside the emotion that comes along from feeling unfairly disparaged and choose the right course of action to take.
How we respond as creators matters, and there are several potential reactions we’ve considered:
- thank the customer for their remarks, even when unjustified and tell them you’ll strive to do improve the experience
- ask them for clarity on their feedback, so that you can better understand the root of their anger/frustration
- confront a false accusation/claim and substantiate your evidence clearly, but do so with empathy
- don’t respond when their attacks exceed a certain bullshit meter. Breathe deeply and just continue to work on your product
As a quick aside, I also love this framework shared with me by our CTO Ben Papillon:
The general rules of thumb are to respond with empathy and truth. Listen to be heard. Solve bugs. Share your roadmap.
Thanks to Brian Wleklinski, Selena Makrides, and Benjamin Papillon for their feedback on this post.
