Is the customer always right?

2 points

10 years ago

After this email exchange I couldn’t really sleep last night. I am posting this here for advice from people more experienced than me, on how to deal with customers who just don’t seem to be ok with whatever you do. Maybe I was in the wrong and it is me who doesn’t get it. Please share suggestions, opinions, whatever.

In no way is this an attack/vendetta thing on the person/company and I have anonymised it to the best extent possible.

I have also not posted previous email exchanges with the said person because they are long and have him calling me “pissy” our design opinions “stupid” and the like. They are also not about this particular bug (more below) but other features in the app.

This particular bug is in the iOS version of our app, Tabata Stopwatch Pro (a Tabata and HIIT Timer) https://itunes.apple.com/app/id664563975 and affects just 1 thing. The voice announcements get reset if you swipe up to force close the app. Till date 4 people have complained about it and it is not a priority at all. In all cases I tell people to not swipe up to force close the app.

This is not an us versus them thing. I am genuinely not sure how to best accommodate our growing needs of users who just ask for feature after feature, and want their bugs fixed right now. Saying no just really makes some people un-happy.

The emails yesterday (edited slightly to make them more readable) are in a text file on this link (they are above the HN character limit to be posted directly and not sure if posting them in parts in comments would be right) https://1drv.ms/t/s!FpBqmKEOgVTliBxLajRtRVpuVlpxZyQM

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