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cURL Author Is Getting Tech Support Emails From Car Owners (daniel.haxx.se)
AmiMoJo writes:
The author of the popular cURL utility has been receiving requests for help from frustrated car owners having difficulty with their infotainment systems... [B]ecause his email address is listed on the "about" screen, as required by the cURL license, some desperate users are reaching out to him in the hopes of finding a solution.
It sounds annoying to receive complaints like "why there delay between audio and video when connect throw Bluetooth and how to fix it." But though he rarely answers them, Stenberg writes that "I actually find these emails interesting, sometimes charming and they help me connect to the reality many people experience out there."
In a post titled "I have toyota corola," Stenberg says "I suspect my email address is just about the only address listed. This occasionally makes desperate users who have tried everything to eventually reach out to me. They can't fix their problem but since my email exists in their car, surely I can!"
It sounds annoying to receive complaints like "why there delay between audio and video when connect throw Bluetooth and how to fix it." But though he rarely answers them, Stenberg writes that "I actually find these emails interesting, sometimes charming and they help me connect to the reality many people experience out there."
In a post titled "I have toyota corola," Stenberg says "I suspect my email address is just about the only address listed. This occasionally makes desperate users who have tried everything to eventually reach out to me. They can't fix their problem but since my email exists in their car, surely I can!"
I think this is a result of so many companies making it nearly impossible to get in contact with them, or only providing a forum on their website and saying to customers "you guys figure it out on your own." Okay, I get it that there's support costs. But I would LOVE to reach out to an engineer at Amazon to tell them about a very irritating and easy-to-repro bug in their Android Kindle app when using it to play audiobooks. Or I'd love to contact Corel to tell them that they're alienating someone who's been buying and using CorelDRAW literally since version 1 with their current marketing shenanigans. But alas, there's no direct and simple way to provide feedback (at least that I've seen), and their products suffer as a result from lack of feedback.
Interestingly enough, I have to give credit to the Visual Studio team at Microsoft for actually doing it right. They have a feedback tool built right into Visual Studio which can give both positive or negative feedback, report bugs, and even take a screenshot right from within the program. Too bad the Windows team doesn't seem to follow their example in listening to feedback. Or more likely, they're simply told by management to implement all the shitty things they've done to their users.
One of these days, I'm waiting for a decently-large company to figure out that they can stand out from the crowd by providing outstanding customer service - that always seems to be the first to go when a company gets large. I'd think customers would actually want to support such a novel enterprise. Of course, the trick is that if your products are crap, your support costs skyrocket. So rather than fix products, it's easier for companies to simply shut down or outsource their support.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It's amazing how decent support can get when you start throwing buckets of money at the company.