Readers here know that I've given Feedlounge props in the past, and they were well deserved. Alex King has done a fabulous job creating a feed aggregator that soars above the competition on usability. I love tagging feeds; I love having access to an OPML on the fly; I love the snappiness of the interface. It's clear that Alex put a hell of a lot of pride, sweat, and thought into this application, and I admire him for it.
That's why it's such a shame that customer support is chasing me and others away. It hasn't been the technical problems, though those have been many. Rather, it is the way Alex and company choose to address them.
Feedlounge has experienced intermittent availability issues. I halfway expected this when I came on, seeing as how this was a small team with a potentially monsterous user base. When I signed up, therefore, I expected issues to be handled with competence. I have no way of knowing whether or not they were.
During outages, Alex gives users a very granular level of detail on the nature of problems and what he's doing to fix them. What has been lacking, however, was a reassurance of where the expected service level lies. Alex seems to treat Feedlounge as a project, not a service. Us users, on the other hand, are interested in service - we are, after all, paying $5/month for this service. On more than one occasion, however, Alex's excuses for why the system went down this time or that time sounded suspiciously like a carpenter blaming his tools. Yes, we're interested in the context of the problems. We're also interested in where you see your responsibilities to us, and how your approach to problems maps to our interests as customers.
Apologies are nice - they are not admissions of weakness; rather, they reaffirm commitments implicit in the provision of fee-for-service agreements. My suspicion is that Alex wants this relationship to be very open-ended. This suspicion rests on where he places emphasis when communicating with customers about problems. We're "partners" with him in discovering Feedlounge problems, it seems like. When people complain about problems, the likely response is that user expectations are too high. Perhaps that's the fault of failing to define the expectations, other than that "users are expected to pay every month"
Which brings me to the final straw. Paypal did not notify me in a timely manner about problems with my account. These problems prompted an automatic cessation of my Feedlounge subscription. When reviewing how this problem was handled for other users with a similar problem, it looks like Alex simply says that new registration is closed, so existing users with cancelled accounts will have to wait. This is unacceptable support: I'm simply out of luck.
This is perplexing to a customer who desires some rationality in the relationship with a service provider. Do you want the money? If I can't even trust you to pursue the profit motive to perform the minimal service you provide, what kind of business model are you pursuing? I don't even know where I fit into that, and in order to use an application I require some minimal guarantees of accessibility and support.
I think Feedlounge could benefit from some better customer support policies, and that would probably require an expert from outside his team. I will be more than happy to renew my subscription on a yearly basis if Alex addresses these issues. Nobody is sadder than I am about having the give up on a great application for such periphery but ultimately critical concerns. Web applications should set the standard for convenience, but that convenience is more than good design - it encompasses an entire business model that seems lacking and, therefore, too unstable to which I can commit for my feed consumption needs.
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