User Feedback

Google Analytics is definitely far from perfection, like probably vast majority of Google portfolio at the moment. Analytics team is willing to improve their product (no surprise so far), but they also choose to show it. It sounds obvious, but it isn’t. How often, after contacting with support, you receive that kind of e-mail:

“We are committed to your success with Google Analytics and we always aim
to provide you with a great support experience.
Please help us further improve our service by answering six brief
questions via the link below.
(…)
Your thoughts will directly contribute to improvements in our support.
We thank you for your time.”

Organizations surprisingly often either don’t care about their support quality or assume it is good or don’t take any effort to check. I don’t say that having a poll is the best way to achieve that, but I have to admit that I’m convinced that Analytics team cares. They care about their product; they care about their support quality. I feel quite safe as a user.

When I was working in Comarch one of our support centers had a simple mechanism allowing users to rate their satisfaction of received service by choosing any number from 1 to 9 on their phones after a call. As you can guess it didn’t work very well because there weren’t many grades other than 9 or 1, but still it was the way of showing people that the team cares about their feedback.

Another way was chosen by Google Reader team. They’re crawling through the web looking for bloggers spreading opinions about their product, leaving comments and digging for user feedback. To be honest I haven’t posted my opinions on forums, neither have I tried to contact their support, but they found my rants, fixed bugs I pointed and left some comments showing they care. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who complained but it doesn’t matter here.

How to act when you have only a couple of customers? It’s even easier. Go to them and ask. Develop a good relationship with the maintenance team on the customer’s side and you can be pretty sure you’ll hear about your performance and about customer’s satisfaction soon. It’s also easier to manage the support team when you have to focus on several customers only, because you can allow having much more direct contacts with them.

No matter which method you prefer, choose one, go out and meet your users, whoever they are. You’ll get feedback about your work as a support and about your product. And one thing more, receiving some positive opinions about your work can be really reinforcing.