Love your grumpy customers
Don’t ignore grumpy customers. Engage with them because they can give you a lot of useful feedback.
If you create something and put it out into the world, someone somewhere will find something to dislike about it. In fact, probably a lot of people. This is especially true in our current internet culture where the norms of communication have been tainted by the obsession with clicks, likes, retweets, etc. Online everyone seems to have a hot take aimed to get attention.
When you release your creation into the world, don’t be surprised when you hear negative things. This is inevitable. You should be pleased that people are discovering what you built and even using it! It would be much worse to hear nothing at all.
While these negative reactions can be difficult to swallow, you should not ignore the haters. You should read all those negative app store reviews and nasty emails. You should even reply to them. Try to get them to give you more information about what they disliked so much. Ask them to hop on a call.
Engaging with people who are mean to us goes against core elements of our psychology. We have strong mental, emotional, and even physical responses when we are attacked. When I start a day by seeing a negative review for Arno on the Google Play Store, I’m in a bad mood for several hours, if not the whole day. Because I’m human, in those moments, I want to tell that person, “Look, asshole, don’t you understand how hard we work on this thing? Don’t you understand that we’re counting every penny we spend just to be able to live so that we can maintain it? Why don’t you take your thoughtless, stupid comment and shove it.”
However, thanks to Makoto’s innate equanimity providing a model and lots of opportunities for practice, I’ve learned to quiet that angry reaction and instead ask myself: How I can get useful information out of this user? Why do they dislike it so much? Is there a bug in the app? Do they feel misled by our marketing? Why were they expecting something different out of the UX?
When we are upset, we often just want to be heard. We want someone else to acknowledge our suffering. This is true of users (as well as friends, family, and romantic partners, by the way). When one of your users has a bad experience and they let you know about it, they so often just want you, the app maker, to say, “I’m sorry that you had a bad experience. Thank you for letting us know. We are looking into the problem right away, and we will let you know as soon as it is fixed.” They suffered, but it was not in vain. They’ve been heard and something is being done. Someone actually cares about their experience. It’s amazing how a simple acknowledgement like this can so quickly defuse a user’s frustration and negativity.
So that’s step 1: Make your grumpy users feel heard. But don’t stop there. You should try to get your grumpy users to tell you even more. We all like to feel useful. Grumpy users clearly have energy — they took the time to say negative things about your app — so why not try to harness it productively? You can say to a grumpy user something like, “The feedback you shared really helps us to improve the product. If you notice anything else, could you please share with us? You can send us an email at…” Only a few of our grumpy users ever respond when we reach out like this, but those who did have given us some great ideas.
The goal is to develop a relationship with these grumpy users. You can have a running email thread or, better yet, regular calls with them. Anytime they experience some friction in your app, or they have an idea for what could be changed or added, you want them to tell you. You want to make the communication to be as easy and pleasant for them as possible. When you communicate with them, be unfailingly polite, gracious, and grateful. Make them feel not only heard but valued. Be sure to actually do something about their feedback. If you fix a bug that they report, ideally do it quickly. And always proactively let them know about it as soon as it is fixed. This encourages them to keep sharing feedback because they know that it is actually useful to you.
Another advantage to building these kinds of relationships with grumpy users is that you convert them from your most vocal critics to potentially your most vocal advocates. Instead of telling everyone how shit your app is, they will tell everyone how great it is and how great the team behind it is.
In sum, hearing negative feedback is hard because you’re human. But don’t ignore it. See it is an opportunity to get a steady stream of valuable feedback from engaged, opinionated users.