bradleyjoyce [dot] com

The past week or has been unique in that I’ve had a couple experiences that have made me keenly aware of the need to make sure you are communicating effectively with your customers. Situation 1 A web app that has hundreds of thousands of active users has been offline for *months* due to a number of reasons. It has a very loyal following and the users are practically up in arms about the lack of information coming from the app’s owners about the progress in getting it back online.

Situation 2 An analytics service that I use and love decided to sunset their desktop app. I had no idea until I complained on Twitter that it was causing my laptop CPU to spike to 100% usage almost instantly, and they responded. They said they emailed their newsletter list, tweeted it, blogged it and facebooked it.. yet I wasn’t subscribed to any of these marketing channels. They chose to push out this critical information to opt-in lists only, rather than just going ahead and emailing each customer directly. Both situations exemplify what I see to be pretty critical failures in customer engagement. What is surprising is how simple the solution is to both. Keeping your customers apprised of the situation of your product, whether you’re developing new features, fixing issues or have some critical piece of news to share, isn’t a huge chore and is 100% necessary for success and survival. It’s a lesson I’m learning myself as I am now working on 4 different apps.