How can operations learn from user feedback and avoid detours?

Learning from user feedback is a big or small thing, and it is not a wrong decision to just categorize the problems and schedule them to be solved one by one. However, if you want to avoid detours, you must find out which issues users like to complain about but don’t really care about.

Whether it is products or operations, it is inevitable to deal with user feedback. Just like Tencent’s widely circulated “10/100/1000” rule, which requires collecting 1,000 user feedbacks every month, product development is inseparable from collating user feedback, understanding user habits, and studying user needs.

However, there is a lot of invalid information in user feedback. Among all user feedback, the most common form is complaints. There are a lot of psychological dissatisfaction factors mixed in with users’ complaints. There will inevitably be a lot of exaggeration and distortion in actual complaints, which will affect our judgment of the real problems of the product. Therefore, if you want to identify the problem, you must first understand the user's implicit meaning.

1. User feedback is essential

Before we discuss the specific ways in which user feedback influences our judgment, let’s take a quick look at the structure in which we are affected by it.

1. Feedback communication between departments

Usually, a dedicated customer service department will handle first-hand user opinions and suggestions. For other functional departments, in addition to occasionally participating in customer service work, the main source of information for understanding feedback is communication with the customer service department. However, not all customer service staff are willing or good at distinguishing and organizing feedback.

• On the one hand, for customer service workers, answering user questions and alleviating user dissatisfaction are the more important job content. If there is no sound information feedback system within the company, a large part of the user feedback information received by customer service personnel cannot be transmitted to the corresponding functional departments.
• On the other hand, even if enthusiastic customer service staff provide user feedback information to relevant departments, it may not necessarily be information with actual improvement value. The problem will not be improved, but will instead damage the enthusiasm of the customer service staff.

Therefore, under the premise of reasonable system guarantees and healthy communication with the customer service department, it is very important to agree on the starting point and method for collecting and organizing user feedback.

1. Feedback at work

Similarly, in the actual work of product and operation, collecting and screening user feedback is also an important and easy-to-carry-out task, but not easy to do well.

It is important because products are used to solve user needs. User feedback is often closer to user needs than what we see or think. Not to mention how much the product improvement direction and operational ideas have been adjusted due to user feedback, even in our plan alone, user feedback data and representative user feedback cases are indispensable to add evidence to the credibility.

Collecting user feedback is an easy task. If you want to get close to users and understand their ideas, you only need to look at the feedback board, type a few words, make a phone call, or have an interview to achieve it. Many years ago, marketing-related majors already had special courses that taught how to conduct market research and provided ideas and mathematical models for processing user feedback.

If user feedback is rational, it will be easier for us to find the most valuable problems based on the data model and solve and improve them. However, there are many irrational emotions in users' complaints. Some people classify user feedback into complaints, feedback, and compliments, but in fact the majority of it is still complaints, complaints, and complaints.

The objects that products serve are ultimately people, and people are animals that are controlled by emotions. When users’ demands are not met smoothly, their complaints inevitably contain many untrue elements. When I participated in the formulation of a system related to medical dispute mediation in a certain region, I found that 100% of the user complaints in the dispute cases I learned about were exaggerated and distorted.

Although the user complaints faced by many products are not as emotionally intense as medical disputes, there is no doubt that there are many emotional elements in user complaints. These emotions, influenced by instinct and culture, have formed several complaint routines with relatively stable starting points and forms of expression, which affect our judgment of the real problems.

2. Arbitrary Complaint Routines

1. Shifting the blame

People don't like to take responsibility for the failure of things. Even if some people appear to be very responsible, it is just a performance to shape their own image. People will instinctively blame their own laziness on the objective environment without considering the room for effort that always exists. Just like some people who could have arrived ten minutes earlier to avoid being late, but would keep complaining about traffic jams.

There are many users who have filed complaints for this reason. For example: When a person buys a bread machine but fails to make bread successfully, it is easy for him to complain about product quality issues, even if the real reason for the failure is that he did not carefully study the instructions and ignored the requirements for bread making for flour, butter and other raw materials. Or if it is a dating product, people who paid but failed to find their other half will inevitably question the authenticity of the product instead of thinking about whether it is attractive enough.

Although this type of blame-shifting complaint manifests itself in various ways, when it comes down to products and operations, they all have a common reason: users pay in order to get the ultimate experience, and the highlights we use to attract users are precisely the packaging and rendering of this experience. However, what we provide to users is only the tools necessary to get the ultimate experience, not the direct ultimate experience.

Just like the example we mentioned earlier, people who buy bread machines most want to experience, and what we frequently emphasize, is the experience of "eating the bread they made themselves" and "making bread for their family members themselves." A bread machine is a tool that can be used to make bread, but it cannot guarantee that the bread can be made 100% successfully. The same is true for marriage and love products. Although what users want and what we convey to them is a happy and fulfilling marriage, it does not mean that they will definitely find the right partner by using marriage and love products.

As shown in the figure, the most ideal state for users is to directly obtain the final experience, but due to the influence of technology, multilateral conflicts and other issues, sometimes the product can only provide a shortcut to the final experience. Even in this case, many users are still too lazy to take shortcuts.

Complaints from this type of users are difficult to resolve satisfactorily. Even if we have enough manpower to personally teach users how to use the product, they will not be satisfied. What we can do is continue to improve our products and reconcile multilateral conflicts so that users can get the experience they want more easily.

Of course, the frequency of users who complain about shirking responsibility is closely related to the type of product. Some products can directly provide users with the final experience they want, such as some content-based products. Such products will inevitably have very few users complaining for the purpose of shirking responsibility.

1. Seeking attention

Everyone desires to be noticed and recognized, which is proof of their survival value and social value. Hoping to find the satisfaction of being noticed and recognized through communicating with customer service may seem like a funny thing, but it is the real underlying mentality of many people.

For example: This situation is very common among seed users. Seed users actively look for product bugs and report them to the product developers. In many cases, they may not gain much benefit, but they can gain a sense of belonging and the pleasure of being recognized.

However, not all users will use this method to get the attention they want. Some people like to seek attention by complaining. Just like a child crying for no reason, just like a young couple quarreling for no reason, they long for more attention and recognition, but have not found the right way.

The complaints from this type of users are usually rather strange. They have no fixed stance, and oftentimes they are complaining to you, but what they are saying are things that have nothing to do with the product.

For example: complaining about the attitudes of other users, complaining about objective environmental problems encountered when using the product, or even something completely unrelated to the product. When this emotion develops to the extreme, it becomes the behavior of calling and flirting with the female salesperson at 10086. However, users are usually more reserved in their expressions because even in their own cognition, they do not realize that they are seeking attention.

Faced with such user complaints, you don’t actually need to make any adjustments or improvements to your product. After all, they are not really complaining in order to get you to make any changes. You just need to give them the recognition they want: let the customer service staff have a better attitude, chat with them, and acknowledge their points of view more during communication, and their complaints will be solved from the root.

1. Striving for control

Everyone likes the feeling of being in control, which makes people feel very comfortable and at ease. But not everything in life goes as planned. Whenever something goes wrong, it may lead to dissatisfaction. Although many people have gradually learned to accept reality, this instinctive desire for control still occurs from time to time.

"The customer is God", businessmen put forward this sentence to educate their employees and to express their service attitude to users. But that doesn’t mean they really treat users as gods. But some people think of themselves as God. If they don’t experience perfect control in a small interaction, they will fly into a rage and make more demands to satisfy their desire for control.

To give a common example, when sales staff go to distribute shopping bags, some people will ask the staff for a few more. If they get them, they will naturally leave happily. If they don’t get them, some people will be very dissatisfied, and even seriously have verbal conflicts with the staff. In fact, the low value of the distributed items themselves cannot cause this kind of conflict. What causes these people's emotional dissatisfaction is the feeling of being out of control and failing to get what they want.

The anger among the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance in Buddhism refers to the dissatisfaction and resentment towards other people or things that go against one's wishes. This kind of emotion actually makes no sense. Even if the other party is doing something that is beneficial to you, as long as it is different from what you imagined, it will still cause dissatisfaction. Just like some parents' well-intentioned reminder to "wear long johns" can cause children to feel disgusted, this desire for a sense of control is completely unreasonable.

Users who complain because they want to be in control often get angry and, while expressing their dissatisfaction, make demands that may not make sense to them but are difficult to achieve. They just want to "force others to do things" and gain the satisfaction of being in control.

You don’t need to pay attention to all the opinions of this type of users on the product. On the one hand, the questions raised by this group are diverse. On the other hand, most of the questions they raise are of no practical significance. Even if you make improvements, it may not necessarily help you win more users.

1. Excessive self-interest

Everyone wants to see more benefits for the same effort. From a profit-seeking perspective, some people have already regarded complaints as a regular behavior pattern. The tolerant attitude adopted by some products when handling complaints has given these users a sweet taste. If they falsely claim that one product is missing, they can get an extra one as compensation. Whenever they make a complaint, they can always get extra compensation in different forms.

Such complaints will not provide you with any valuable suggestions for improvement, but will simply complain about your own experience and ask for some compensation. Such users are as detestable as those who take advantage of the freeloaders, but it is not easy to distinguish them from users who actually encounter certain problems.

An effective solution is to establish more detailed data statistics, and then take targeted measures against users who frequently encounter the same problems and request compensation. Just like when dealing with medical disputes or car accidents, the public security department can retrieve the records of the corresponding personnel through the archive system, thereby distinguishing professional medical troublemakers and scammers from ordinary victims.

1. Envious

Some users will tell you that your product’s function is not as good as others, or that service is not as good as other products. The core demand of this group of users is to show off. They hope to make themselves look better and have a higher social status by attacking others, so as to gain envy and praise and satisfy their inner emptiness.

These users’ complaints always show their “high vision” and use the advantages of other products to suppress the shortcomings of the product. In fact, since these "discerning" users still choose your product after learning about other products, it means that your product is more suitable for them, perhaps due to cost factors or other functions that they did not mention, so their complaints do not mean leaving.

Just like those people in the comment section of pirated movie and game websites who mock others for using pirated products, they are actually using pirated products themselves, but they hope to make themselves look more valuable and have more status in this way.

The opinions of these users are of certain value. They have indeed found out the specific shortcomings of your product and provided you with directions for improvement by using the features of other products as examples. However, when making specific adjustments, you must base them on the situation of your own product. If you deviate from the product positioning and want to cater to users in all market segments, it will not be conducive to the development of the product.

Just like some American airlines that target the low-end market, although they often receive complaints from passengers about problems such as narrow seats and poor dining services, they never meet these demands. If the airfare is increased to meet these demands, the passengers who made these demands will no longer choose their flights.

Final Thoughts

Learning from user feedback is a big or small thing, and it is not a wrong decision to just categorize the problems and schedule them to be solved one by one. However, if you want to avoid detours, you must find out which issues users like to complain about but don’t really care about.

Source: Mo Tao