Customer feedback and humble entrepreneurial pie

We've been getting a lot of customer feedback in response to Judy's Book evolution.  This post should give you insight into some of the dialogues that I've been having lately.  This feedback is not positive -- it's hard for an entrepreneur to hear this about their company. Especially when the customer is right and reasonable. That said, this feedback is critical to hearing AND responding to....it points out the areas in your company that are weak. 

All in all, this correspondence is a healthy piece of humble entrepreneurial pie.

This is a post from a Judy's Book customer on my investors blog (BRAD FELD)

I have to say that I am disappointed with Judy's Book's new focus on deals/shopping. I see that it is probably easier to monetize a deals site than a review site, but I hoped that JB would 1) resolve problems with the reviews (which I mentioned in a previous comment on this blog, and still do not appear to be resolved) before expanding their focus, 2) that deals would be integrated with reviews (i.e., when I am reading a review of Company X, deals for Company X are also displayed) rather than creating a completely separate section, and 3) that Judy's Book would improve their response time on emails and "feedback" messages from "never" to something more reasonable (perhaps an automated acknowledgement sent immediately and follow-up from a real person within 2 business days - is that really too much to ask?).

On a related note, as a JB user I was recently interviewed by a JB staffer about the new deals portion of the site. As a "thank you" they sent me a T-shirt, but they sent it two sizes too small. What would have been a nice gesture ended up irritating me and wasting their postage. It would have been better if they had just sent a note.

Get good at what you already do before you expand.

This is my response to the customer

Cmadler,
Thanks for taking the time and care to provide feedback.   I'd like to take a moment to respond to your 4 comments:

i) You are right. As a company, we've had a bigger appetite for feature and scope than what we've been able to digest in terms of delivering users a quality user experience. I am aware of this fact and it is a flaw in our culture that I am working hard to correct.  You are right to point it out -- as has my lead investor Brad Feld -- and all I can say is that I acknowledge the weakness and I hope that what we put out in the future is an improvement.

ii) A follow up to your point above, we are working on creating a higher quality integrated user experience for Judy's Book users. This will take a few months of work -- and will be iterative in nature. As you may know, we're working hard on evolving Judy's Book into a place for smart shoppers.

iii) Timely response to customer service requests is a fair and reasonable expectation (period).  Servicing a large community site with such a small organization is a challenging task -- but not responding is unacceptable.

iv) Your t-shirt : Simply, this was a well intentioned error.  Please tell me the correct size so that we can get you the right size shirt.

I'm sorry if you're experience has been sub-optimal ....we're working hard to improve the experience and provide more value to our customers.

Yours,
Andy Sack

Comments

[p-air]

I totally empathise w/your situtation here. In reading this post, I'm reminded at the comments we got at Tribe when we did an interface design change. I wasn't an advocate of the direction we were taking but I understood the rationale for exploring the changes.

If you can stand from taking the personal attacks personally, it's actually kind of funny, and a reminder that you can never make all people happy no matter how hard you try. In all of this, what goes completely unnoticed is the fact that this is indeed a business, and that you're not making these changes out of some sadistic desire to make your users' lives more difficult. It's called survival and some times that means evolving the business or watching it wither (in which case they won't even have someone to bitch at ;-). Suffice it to say, it almost doesn't matter what changes you make, there's always someone out there that feels like their world is collapsing and you just have to do your best to explain your reasons clearly and hope they understand as you move through it.

Good luck through this process.

[Rahul]

Great post Andy. While some of the service issues need to be addressed, from a product standpoint, we will never please everyone. Kathy Sierra has a great post on this:

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/10/dilbert_and_the.html

A little extract from that below:

"If everyone exposed to a product likes it, the product will not succeed... The reason that a product “everyone likes” will fail is because no one “loves” it. The only thing that predicts success is passion, even if only 10% of the consumers have it."

[Tom Grubisich]

Making such big change, talking about reaction to it in public and then listening to feedback is brave management -- management 2.0, I guess we should call it. But "listen" to the silent feedback, too, from members who aren't saying anything, at all. Some of my favorite conversation makers on JB, who helped give the service its special juice, have become eerily silent. I used to look forward to the emails announcing their comments, which were witty, sometimes weird and almost always thoughtful. If they've been traded off for a larger number of deal devotees, you may have gained quantity at the cost of quality. Don't thin the soup.