How to turn upset users into your happiest customers
From 3 years of dealing with the negative feedback that comes along with any internet product
Most of the feedback I get about HappyFeed is overwhelmingly positive. I’d hope so, because it’s an app to make people happier. You would assume the reviews should be above average in terms of positivity.
Good feedback feels fantastic. It’s the main driving force behind my recent decision to devote more time to HappyFeed. But no one wants to read about how I deal with positive comments (I usually write them in my own HappyFeed). You’d rather hear how I’m dealing with upset customers — the concerned users, the ‘haters,’ and the people who are just having a shitty day and need an outlet.
Turning That Frown Upside Down
Every now and then I get some not-so-inspiring feedback. Usually something has gone wrong with the app and sometimes the words are not so kind.
People on the internet often forget that there are other people on the internet. Using the internet is a lot like driving a car; sometimes you forget there are actual people in the other cars. They write angry messages in the same way they might lay on their horn while driving.
Using the internet is a lot like driving a car; sometimes you forget there are actual people in the other cars.
Luckily, there’s a clear solution once you recognize the core problem. Simply make them recognize that you are human just like them. You both make mistakes and you both want to be happy at the end of the conversation.
The best way to respond to these people is to remind them that you are human.
This should be your number one goal with upset customers, but this is just the starting point. Once you’ve established that you are just another human being doing your job, and trying to do it right, you can use the following techniques to turn those upset customers into happy ones.
1. Be polite
If someone tells you your product is garbage, you may want to say:
My product isn’t garbage, you are! 🖕
Try to avoid this urge. Never, never respond with reactionary emotion. I would suggest going for a walk or looking at puppy videos online. Seriously, it works.
Instead, start by thanking them for taking the time to write to you, and ask considerate questions to find out what exactly happened, why it is upsetting, and how you can try to fix it for them.
2. Show them that you care
You are not responding to feedback to make this person shut up, prevent them from leaving bad reviews, or avoid more angry people in the future. You are responding to this person because you want them to have an overwhelmingly positive experience with your product.
You respond to them because you want them to have an overwhelmingly positive experience with your product.
When you frame your intentions properly, showing users that you care should come naturally. Here are some of the ways it may manifest:
- Respond quickly, even if it’s just to let them know you got their message
- Be friendly and helpful, even if they aren’t
- Refrain from judgement, even though it can be really hard
3. Provide as much information as possible
Do Negative Nancys understand database models or the way your S3 buckets are set up to store photos? The odds are they neither know nor care, but they still appreciate it when you take the time to tell them why your product is not working the way they want it to, or why it’s going to take a few months to build a new feature.
Sometimes I respond with a whole paragraph about how the app works. The customer might not read my technical ramblings (I’m 90% sure they don’t) but it certainly conveys that I’m thinking about it and working on it.
I’d rather they think I’m a nerdy weirdo who cares than some aloof manager with no time for them.
Reducing Negative Feedback
Rather than dealing with criticism, wouldn’t it be nice if you could just find a way to drastically reduce the amount of negative feedback you receive.
Yes. Please.
Here are a few tricks I’ve learned over the years:
- Make it easy to leave feedback. If they need to spend a lot of time looking for an email address, odds are that they’ll be even angrier when they finally find it. I’d also suggest having different strategies for positive and negative feedback.
- Keep your product simple. Less features means less that could possibly go wrong — focus on a small set of features and make sure each one is either delightful or completely unnoticeable. HappyFeed is almost painfully simple, but that’s the thing people like most about it.
- Focus on a small set of users. You can absolutely never please everyone. The best thing you can do is build your product to make a small subset of people amazingly happy. Keep this in mind in how you market and grow your audience.
Focus on a small set of features and make sure each one is either delightful or completely unnoticeable.
Everyone Else: Don’t Be A Dick.
I will never forget one of the emails I got from a “customer” when I was working on Quixplore (a previous startup) in the early days.
“Take me off this f!%&ing email list!!”
Yikes! Ok!
I was living off credit cards, unsure of how I’d pay rent the next month, and so stressed out that I could barely sleep. That one message was so disheartening that I still remember it 5 years later. I can understand why this person didn’t want to receive our emails (his friend signed him up), but defaulting to this behavior is inexcusable.
Always, always, always ask in a nice way first. You can be a dick if they are a dick to you, but only after you tried to be nice.
Sometimes you want to make people feel bad for making you feel bad, but as they say, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” So please remember everyone is just human. Everyone just wants to be heard. And everyone just wants to get some value out of your product.
Each week in Building Happiness I’ll be covering a new topic about what it’s like bootstrapping a consumer internet company, HappyFeed.
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