Proving My Point

I'm still kicking around the idea of how to teach (or at least define) good writing for community management. To that end, I was idly googling the friend who spurred this train of thought, and came across a completely unrelated paper. That paper contained this lovely bit:

"If you ask people for information (or compel them to provide it), you should give it back to them in some familiar form that lets them see how it is useful or interesting. They will then be less inclined to resent your asking in the first place, more inclined to be curious about the relationship of their work to others’, and more open to considering its implications"

I sent that around for various of my colleagues to admire, and Sanya used it as the nucleus of her weekly column. It's a good column - go read it.

What really interest me are the comments. The MMO players who are invested to the point where they read and comment on industry-insider process columns like Sanya's are the ones most likely to give feedback to the companies in the first place, so what they have to say is worth listening to.

"Sending your feedback to Customer Support will most likely get you a "Thanks for your feedback!" standard response while your suggestions will end up in the CRM's digital bin as a single person's opinion will most probably be regarded as rather unimportant.

You will be better off with becoming part of a focus group (if such thing is in place), or with providing feedback on the game forums where other players and maybe community representatives may discuss it." - Phall

This, I think, rather proves the point of the quote above. The feedback to CS is just as important, if not more so - it could be on any topic, and the CS folks are well-situated to spot trends and report them (although some teams are better than others in having a channel for the CS team to pass those issues along.) A focus group is usually, well, focused, and feedback that doesn't touch on the specific area in question is tossed out - but usually the focus groups have much more visibility into the process and the decisions as they're made, so their feedback feels much more influential.

"The suggestion and class-specific forums almost NEVER draw an official dev response... the ACTUAL feedback forums are viewed as the places where ideas go to die, so fewer and fewer people bother." - ArKane

That definitely matches my experience. People like to feel heard, and you can't look interested and nod meaningfully over the internet. What you can do is respond. The problem is, not every idea or thought or post is one we can respond to without causing even more trouble. The standard "Thanks for your feedback!" note rapidly becomes worthless, because it's a form response. That's why customers like it best when they have a forum they can post on, particularly one where the devs respond. They can tell they're being listened to by their peers as well as by their desired target audience. The problem with that of course being that it doesn't scale.

The weekly Q&A/Grab Bag style of response that Sanya herself pioneered is one way to handle the situation, but I can say from experience (about two years of those linked archives were my posts) that it can be a very tricky thing to pick what gets attention and what doesn't. And it's even trickier when you have weeks where there are literally no new customer issues that you can address, because there's no decision or reaction that can be made public.

So this is what I'm kicking around. There's gotta be a better way to do this that a) encourages quality customer feedback and b) scales with the size of the community without requiring ridiculous amounts of headcount. I have my own plots and schemes, but I'd love to hear other people's thoughts.