E126: What To Do When Users Get ANGRY

Eventually you’re going to break something in your B2B SaaS.  This may lead to some strong reactions and angry emails from your users.  After the initial shock wears off, you’ll have time to fix whatever is broken.  However, the good part is that your users are engaged and now you have an opportunity to learn critically important information about how to make your product better.

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Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is what to do if all of a sudden you’ve made your users angry. Now, if you get an emotional reaction like that, you might immediately think that you need to panic and pounce all over what went wrong, or find out what went wrong and scramble.

But what I want to tell you is that I want to interrupt that essentially right away and say that any type of an emotional reaction about your product is probably a good thing. Now what I mean by that is that means people are engaged. That probably means people are using your product as such. They have a good reason to get to that point at least.

So, so far that is a sign of progress. Now, whatever the reason that you’ve gotten some type of a strong reaction from your users, maybe something that was working broke or whatever, whatever the reason. If they’re reaching out to you and sharing more details about that, that’s a good thing. You want them to provide you with as much feedback as possible, because that can be really hard to get, and that feedback helps us get greater context around what I call essentially the why component of their experience, right?

With analytics and other tools, survey tools, et cetera, we can get things like what people are doing. We can get things like how they’re doing it. The big missing piece though, typically, and what a lot of these tools lack is the ability to give us insight into why people are doing what they’re doing. So that’s.

We need more qualitative data. The quantitative tools are not great at giving us insight into that, but that information’s super powerful because if we understand more about the why, we have an understanding in terms of what motivates your users to do what they’re doing. Use your tool, not use your tool, and that insight’s really helpful to figure out how to make your tool better and better.

So if you’ve gotten some type of strong emotional reaction from your users or something’s broken or whenever, you can really use that essentially as almost a metric for how engaged are the folks that have access to your product. And it’ll help you figure out essentially what’s wrong, so that you can fix it.

So that’s good too. So after the initial potential shock wears off for, oh my goodness, that I just upset my entire user base, realized that there is. There is some flexibility here in terms of them being reasonable to an extent, to give you the time you need in order to fix whatever went wrong. But the good news is that they’re engaged, and the more engaged that they are, the more feedback they’re gonna get.

The more feedback that you’re gonna get, the better you can figure out how to improve your product from where it is at the moment.