Restaurant managers make regular tours through their restaurant talking to each table asking, “How was everything? Was everything cooked the way you like it?” It’s called touching tables, and sometimes when you see an old-school manager doing it, he’ll actually touch the table. In theory, it’s supposed to make the customer feel welcome and surface any problems that popped up.
In reality, even most of the dissatisfied people say the same thing: “Everything was fine.”
The only ones who complain at that point are people who had a truly horrendously bad experience, and it gives the manager a chance to save a slim minority of guests from never coming back. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help with the mildly dissatisfied guests, the people who weren’t happy, but don’t want to cause a fuss. They’ll just never come back.
That’s where surveys come in. Send the customers an in-depth survey, and they get a little more honest. They’ll give better – well, more honest, anyway – feedback to tell you what you’re doing wrong or right. Surveys still aren’t a silver bullet, though, because they’re short and they’re not very personal. People get cynical about surveys and think, “Nobody’s ever going to read this – I’m not going to waste my time because it won’t make a difference.”
Today in Brian Knight’s SSIS Boot Camp, he answered several complaints about SSIS weaknesses by referring attendees to Microsoft Connect. At Connect, you can add feature requests and bug reports, then vote on requests by others. I hear that same thing from MVPs over and over: if you have a problem, go file it on Connect, because people really do listen. I know they do, but there’s a perception from end users that it’s going into the circular file.
To take it to the next level, to really get wildly honest and detailed feedback, you have to be wildly honest and detailed with the customer. Microsoft can’t do that with the public on Connect, but for certain customers, you can sign NDA paperwork and get some pretty darned honest and detailed information. I’ve seen things that get me genuinely excited about where SQL Server is going. You don’t have to be an ISV, either – when I was at Southern Wine (an Enterprise & Premier customer) we got some good insights. I wish everybody could get that same level of honesty, detail and future vision from Microsoft, but a company can only be so transparent. (Try getting anything even mildly future-related from Apple!)
We do the same thing: tonight & tomorrow, Quest is hosting a Customer Advisory Board event at the PASS Summit. We invite as many customers as we can to participate in an honest, detailed forum about what we’re doing right, what’s borked, and what we’re doing about it. I have some conversations with CAB members that I could never have in front of a microphone, no matter how transparent I am on the blog. They get to see behind the curtain, and we get their opinions. It ain’t cheap – this hotel is seriously swanky – but it’s totally worth it.
The alternative is having your customers say, “Everything was fine,” and then never coming back.
I wish I could be there for the Customer Advisory Board. If I have an abundance of anything, it’s opinions about how to improve software.
Good article. I’ve written about Microsoft Connect before.
http://dbwhisperer.blogspot.com/2008/05/how-useful-is-connectmicrosoftcom.html
And in general I think they do pretty well.
I am a little surprised that some of the most voted on issues:
(341872 and 299296 in particular) got responses that boil down to “That’s too difficult right now”