Every so often while using NetSuite, it pops up and asks me to fill in a quick little survey – basically how likely are you to recommend NetSuite and why? This is annoying when your in a rush but on balance not a bad way for them to ensure their customers are happy.
There’s just one catch – every single time I tell them that I’d never recommend NetSuite and that they should improve product quality, specifically they should handle escaping XML tags correctly. As a company that makes HTML editors, we quite often send and receive emails that talk about HTML tags rather than just including them. Unfortunately, NetSuite for the past 5 years or more has happily messed these emails up and we’ve had to come up with complicated ways to get the original email text back out. We’ve reported this to them on multiple occasions and at one point had to actually put in a XSS exploit to get them to understand how big a problem it was. Over time they’ve shifted where the correct HTML will appear in the system, but never actually fixed it entirely.
So, coming back to the survey – what’s the point of interrupting users to get their feedback when you go and ignore it anyway?
Nathan says:
I’ve always thought survey’s were a good thing to have. Taking an active approach to ask user’s what they think gives a chance for balanced feedback. Otherwise you’re probably only going to hear from irate customers with no indication of how wide spread actual problems or need for improvements are.
So if they’re not actually using the feedback, two points still spring to mind
1) As long as the user doesn’t realise their feedback is being ignored, makes them feel like they have had a chance to vent their frustrations to someone. I had a hell of a time using birch’s online site to book tickets on the iphone, but there was a comments section for me to vent in at the end so I felt a little better afterwards.
2) Just because its being ignored today, doesn’t mean it’s going to be ignored always. In the future someone who realises the value of all that user feedback they’ve collected can immediately begin to take action on it.
As an analogy I’m sure we can all appreciate, we spit insane amounts of info into our app log files and never look at it for the most part, but the moment there’s a problem we appreciate the ability to jump in and see just how often it’s been cropping up.
Adrian Sutton says:
I didn’t update the post, but after filling out the survey it popped up another 4 times that same day insisting I fill it out again. If you’re going to interrupt my work you’d better pay attention to that feedback *now* not just ignore it for 5 or 6 years. Log files don’t interrupt work… :)