The power of a 1 star review!
A couple of weeks ago I got my shiny new Pixel 6, just before leaving for a cycling trip in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. It turned out to be the best mobile camera I've used (see the cover photo) but it was also a nightmare.
No, there's nothing wrong with the phone itself. My banking app just kept crashing on Android 12, to the point that it was completely unusable. This happened just when I needed it the most, while traveling. Frustrated, I did what any tech savvy consumer would do, gave them a 1 star review and questioned whether they even tested it on the latest OS.
After venting my frustration, off I went to a blissful world of Assam and Arunachal for a week, mostly disconnected from the world.
As a side note for any cycling enthusiasts - NorthEast India and especially Arunachal Pradesh is a destination you'll definitely want to check out. Beautiful nature, warm people and amazing roads, probably the best roads in India for cycling.
Fast forward one week - I'm back to work, catching up on my emails and I'm greeted with a 1 star review on one of our own apps, from an equally frustrated patient (user). The universe is saying touché! ????♂?
Unlike the banking app, which is full of 1 star reviews going back many months, at @avegen we are used to near 5 star ratings on our Digital Health Apps. We develop and maintain a dozen or so mobile apps, used by hundreds of thousands of users around the world. We are hyper focused on customer experience and a one star review is taken very seriously!
?????? I'm really proud of our engineering team who got into high gear to respond to this. They debugged the issue down to an open source library, which was misbehaving only on Android. Anyone who uses open source technology knows that you are standing on the shoulders of giants but if the giant so much as sneezes you feel the tremors :-). Our team was able to fix this issue in a week's time, release the fixed version and respond to the user!
Such is the power of a 1 star review! It really holds the product team accountable to the people who we do all this for - in our case the patients whose lives we are committed to improving. As a user you can make a difference by simply expressing your frustration with a few keystrokes and if you are the product owner, you can make an even bigger impact by taking these to heart!
Now if only my bank was listening to all those one star reviews.... ??
Performance Testing
3 年Very Nice Neeraj Apte ! Listening to customer complaints offers a perfect opportunity to acknowledge and address those issue. While demonstrating to other customers that you a company that cares about its customers by action.
Principal & Founder | Angel Investor & Advisor | Sr. Product Mgmt & Marketing professional | Industry partnership & Business Dev Manager | Program Manager
3 年Its a good story with an important message. Happy to know you were able to complete your cycling expedition in the North-east part of India given the fiasco with the banking app on Pixel 6. Hope Pixel 6 (Android 12) didn't have any connectivity issues. Now coming to companies responding to very poor user reviews depends on the teams culture and priorities. This is one of the differentiating characteristics of the product and the company's leadership. Glad to know Avegen takes its customer reviews very seriously.
The best part is when a user updates their review in response to the fix ??. Nothing motivates the team like a satisfied customer...
Director, Product Consulting - Strat & Enterprise
3 年From one pixel owner to another ( i have the older one :) Android presents unique challenges with every vendor. Folk do have to prioritize bugs/reviews from users, but the lack of acknowledgement ( forget fixing it) is why large companies lose sight of user feedback. The tide is turning as users demand more and those paying attention will benefit in long run.
Advisor | Non-Executive Director | 100 Women to Watch list 2020
3 年A very good read Neeraj, thank you.