Post of the Year Contender: Receiving Customer Feedback

Tara Hunt has an excellent post today about customer service and how to both receive and integrate it into your product or service. I have been a nut about customer service since I was a youngster and have written about it several times.

This post is so well written that I am entering it into the "Post of the Year" contest. Here are her 12 points, go to her site for all the discussion...

1. Listen to expert users, but don’t (often) integrate their suggestions. 
2. Intermediate users may not tell you what they need, so watch their behaviour. (and sometimes when they tell you what they want, what they actually want is very different)
3. Respond to every feedback suggestion, even if you respond to tell them you won’t be integrating it.
4. Try not to take flames and other negative feedback personally.
5. If you do use a suggestion that is unique, give credit to the person who gave the suggestion.
6. Indicate changes with a flag.
7. Smaller, incremental changes or one big dump of changes?
8. Don’t hire your biggest fans.
9. Don’t overlook really simple, small suggestions.
10. Ego doesn’t belong here.
11. Trying to please everyone will leave you with a boring product.
12. Do it right over doing it fast, but don’t take forever.

Customer service can absolutely be a differentiator for your product/service and it is important to think about from day 1. Ted from Dogster made one of the first people he hired a customer support person. Number 10 is one of the hardest things to handle when you created the app, own the app, love the app and also do the service.