• jeff's blog post - January 4, 2008

  last modified January 4 by k0s

The Customer is Usually Right

We don't really have a customer workflow right now.  Its not really my place to design it, but some ideas have occurred to me that I thought I should note:

  •  if a customer complains about something, are we sure its working?
    • make sure we have a test for it
    • if we're sure, then why for the complaint?  analyze this and fix the root cause
  • do we have indication on our site that it is under heavy development?
    • i at least would be (slightly) more forgiving if i thought i was trying out a beta feature.  if i clicked a button that i fully expected to work and it didn't, i'd probably be frustrated at the whole site;  if i clicked a button that was marked "experimental" and it didn't work, i *might* try back later (maybe, when it wasn't thus labeled)
  • if the customer wants something, do we give them what they want?
    • need a way to get post-implementation feedback;  there's no point in doing lots of work in order not to provide desired functionality;  this just leads to bitterness on both sides
    • conversely, having mutual feedback leads to mutual good feelings:  the customer knows we care about them, we know we did something desirable
  • site errors.  we talked about these, now lets act:
    • get rid of these
    • catch them + make them nicer; turn them into a way the customer can interact with us (incentive?  maybe the Wall of Bugs)wallofbugs.png
    • be ON the error logs;  watch them for errors and fix them