Show HN: I built an app that helps amplify the voice of the customer
shieldvoc.com
shieldvoc.com
I run a few SaaS apps and by far the majority of my time spent in support is dealing with unreasonable customers. In the past, SaaS apps used to be able to ignore them but now they hold your company hostage with threat of bad reviews.
It's true that these systems could be used for good - letting other users know about issues with a product. In my experience, it's not how they're being used in practice. These people want special treatment and they get it - from me, and from everyone else.
It's really not fair to my other customers. I'd love to refund these unreasonable people entirely and send them on their way. I don't want their business. But the damage is just too great for refusal of service. One 1-star review is as powerful as ten 5-star reviews.
I'd like to see a rating and social media system that tracks the average rating of these customers across platforms. I'm sure it's overall negative for those on the attack.
These often verbally abusive, entitled customers are a real problem. They increase the cost for those not willing to be as pushy/loud/abusive. Giving them an even stronger voice is not a step forward.
How much would you pay for such an analytics and customer grading system?
But it would be nice that attached to that rating was a rating of the customer "this person gives an average of 1.5 stars" on the platform. And maybe weigh that rating as such.
Engineering time would be best spent on solving real world problems.
$8k later, we refunded them both because of an entirely unfounded rant and 1* reviews.
They get away with it.
Seconded on a system that tracks reviewers.
You explicitly need to track their first review and their updated review - these people often update from a 1* to a 5* after a refund.
Let us know:
- Their average first rating
- Their average total rating
- How often a user changes from a 1* to a 5* / upgrades their review.
This will point out abusers.
Like state that they were wanting special treatment, or were verbally abusive and give logs of their interactions?
Do you think the chance of abuse is high? (Eg a competitor posing as an unsatisfied customer, or a customer abusing it trying to get free things) What mitigation plans do you have for this, if you think it could come up?
> It feels like in many cases, you're reliant on the company having a good channel for addressing concerns (Some do, some don't). Reviews aren't necessarily a good fit, yet customers may go straight there, for want of something better.
That is true and even more so having a social media presence in our case. Our approach is to focus on companies that already have a social media presence and propose an alternative way to track customer satisfaction and reduce the subjectivity baked into that metric by relying on the facts and measuring customer service quality instead. We still provide users with a space to express their feelings as they would on review sites and receive support from other users in similar situations, while we work with companies to get better at serving their customers.
> Do you think the chance of abuse is high? (Eg a competitor posing as an unsatisfied customer, or a customer abusing it trying to get free things) What mitigation plans do you have for this, if you think it could come up?
Moderation is key for any platform like ours, because our user community is placing an enormous amount of trust in us to ensure that we’re helping genuine users like themselves, which means letting through genuine complaints on our platform and bringing down abusive complaints where we have compelling evidence. We have processes in place for complaint moderation today, and as we scale, we will automate more of these processes where needed.
/nitpick
(Tongue in cheek!)
Advantage of doing this publicly is that you can create sort of question-and-answer site where users can search for specific complaint they have or find similar one.