Everything has gone ‘right’ - bugs are caught and fixed, all lines of support are operating smoothly; the ‘problem’ is that it’s just not doing it for some users
Disproof
You’ve got a PR and social listening strateg(y/ist)
Consequences
More than one startup has found themselves in a situation where a co-founder gets locked in a flame war with some pissed off user on twitter
It should be hopefully obvious that letting the unplanned happen in public discourse on the open internet means that one misstep will blow up in one’s face
In short, you will lose customers not only over the problem itself, but compounded as your cack-handed response itself becomes the object of a witch hunt
If you time things well, you could just murder your company on the cusp of traction.
Think about it, you’re iterating, things are starting to resonate. People are NOTICING you
Then you bungle a response to someone who you might have shifted the feature set away from serving and lo behold, a dumpster fire as you insult their grandmother
Causes
Not having a strategy for:
Figuring out why users are dissatisfied
Figuring out which ones should be addressed and which ones are not actually legitimate
Resolving the dissatisfaction in such a way that leaves the user an even bigger supporter of the product and the brand
Sometimes it’s a user/value mismatch and you shouldn’t have been serving them in the first place, and it was just bad luck they picked up the product
Approaches
This really depends on just how aggrieved, motivated and connected the user is
You should never really be in the business of ignoring genuine dissatisfaction
Especially in cases where reputation is at stake
Unless you calculate that the pruning effect of that user’s damaging your reputation with mismatched allows you to focus more
Do this maths very carefully
If the grievance is legitimate, the user is motivated and connected, the impact could be as little as losing some users and as much as losing most users
Either way, don’t not consider it, and definitely don’t go to war with them
It doesn't come down to who was right - it comes down to how it looks