Customer Feedback Stories

I’ve compiled a list of feedback from customers/external stakeholders. These were either from internal emails that were forwarded on, information from Support, or public posts on various social media platforms.

ACME is completely closing down. I advised to re-start ACME.	Customers often refer to our software as ACME when that’s our company name. It always sounds bizarre to us, and can sound like a completely different meaning. “ACME is closing down”“you heard it here first . we’re shutting shop”
The group’s first software, named ‘ACME’, had a character based user interface and was developed from 1990, with full commercial roll-out taking place in 1993.	Even the newspapers used the wrong name. No software was released simply under the company name without any subtitle
We have been speaking to our insurance company about the potential of a serious issue happening and they have advised us to keep them informed of any action or non-action from ACME in getting this resolved. “I can’t stress enough the risk associated with the poor performance of the ACME system as it currently stands, and saying that it’s being looked at and is with development is not acceptable. This has been with ACME for months now, and it remains unresolved. The issue needs to be a priority, and we need to have assurances that it will improve ASAP and not within a few months.”	Sometimes I have felt we have wrongly prioritised issues and it’s easy to understand how some users will be fed up if they perceive their issues haven’t been fixed promptly. Getting an insurer involved sounds like a serious escalation!
One of our employees, and it only does seem to be the one,(this has been going on for about a year now) when he is working his way through his tasklist, the blue link disappears and his task prints out. To make the link come back we have to go out of workflow into another section within ACME then back into workflow and the blue link re-appears. He is refusing to do any tasks at all now because it is taking him forever just to complete one. Is anyone else having this problem? What can be done to resolve this? We have tried a new smartcard, new keyboard, new computer, our local IT department have signed on and checked he has all the correct software and they can’t see any problems – it has to be an ACME problem	Occasionally, there can be obscure issues just affecting a small number of users. It’s always a pain trying to diagnose given limited people have seen the issue and might not be able to recreate on demand. I thought it was funny how the user is refusing to work, and how they replaced all hardware, even the keyboard!
I’ve had a customer ticket that became about 4 or 5 different ones and it still hasn’t been resolved – the workaround is a bit of a hoot as well. The 1st ticket is 9 years and counting, but I actually think it’s been in ACMEPro since conception… The mobile number displays in the work number field (and vise-versa) when printing ‘Full Export with Attachments’ and ‘Full Summary with Attachments’ WorkaroundBefore printing a full summary with attachments, change the order in which the telephone numbers are showing in the customer registration details.	This is a good example of a bug that would be so easy to fix but for whatever reason has been deprioritised, much to everyone’s frustration. Then some people are happy to use a stupid workaround of swapping the data before printing, then presumably swapping it back after.
“i get the wheel of mindfulness when it’s trying to locate me. i like the look of it though. currently a long way short of minimal viable product. ”	Users like coming up with creating names for a loading wheel. “Wheel of mindfulness” is a good one. I like how they claim the new feature looks good but way short of actually being usable.
“whose design? A moron’s?”	I’ve lost the exact quote but a customer once said this when they asked why a screen had been completely replaced. We had said it had been redesigned with new functionality and ease of use.
This time our approach was a little different as we decided to employ Guerrilla research in order to understand our users’ experiences. Despite the name, I can assure you that no animals (or users for that matter) were harmed during the research!	This one wasn’t from a customer but a colleague doing user research. I think they have convinced themselves that Gorilla is spelt Guerrilla and they made themselves look like a total idiot.
Another day, another crashed computer…wasting so much valuable time I have customers waiting and I’m running out of patience…	Some users claim to see crashes every day. I understand their frustration, if true.
“when it does work, it is actually amazing”.	This is similar to the “looks good” one. It’s like they know the feature is bad but want to say something good because we have asked them for feedback.
My list – some concerns are more serious … others just glitches that frustrate on a daily basis Maybe we can do the job of the people who are meant to be testing the systemACME Glitches1) Every letter that’s sent from word via email is sent as “new letter 1” – no system to track / individualise – UNSAFE2) When completing tasks, I cannot send electronically unless I go into the summary screen and send from there instead. Doesn’t happen all the time so clearly a glitch.3) Dancing word document – screen adjustment – every time you create a new word document.4) Tasks ribbon across middle – never accurate. does not refresh unless in the workflow (so what’s the point as I’m already in workflow!!)5) Task ribbon across middle – Doesn’t show what tasks for me or for others6) No functioning alert system – enough said (similar with template manager)7) Non-functioning messaging system. Will need to removed OR replaced with something that works8) In a task. you can select a cluster of text (ie using ctrl+shift in reverse (Ctrl+shift + <) but you can’t do it with ctrl+shift+>.9) Why does ACME forget my pin. frequently in the midst of digitally signing? An error box appears saying “pin incorrect” and I have to log off and back in to “re-connect”10) how many people have their details in this format “AHMED, Kamran (Mr)” – yet this is the chosen format of ACME when adding macro to letters11) calendar does not highlight bank holidays / public holidays on appointments screen12) Open any template – cursor never in the only box you’re going to type in to.. same for customer search function etc. if there is a box to type in – why nothave the cursor there on opening that search function?13) not able to order searches by clicking on the field bar – MS Excel and pretty much every other search function allows thisit works in some parts of ACME and not other… why!14) Appointment book refresh. i reported this myself 4 years ago and i was pacified. Then ACME brought out a “fix” – Keep clicking refresh!.Now its failing all over again15) ID number – the current “search” tab does not allow you to enter an ID number with spaces.YET when you “copy ID number” from selected bar you cannot paste that back into ACME’s own “search” tool because it has spaces. Therefore ACME does not recognise its own output	A rant from social media. Sometimes I think it would be good to target certain users and actually address their complaints. Most seem like quick wins.

Digital Clean Up & Net Zero Sustainability

Several years ago, my employer was constantly talking about Net Zero/Carbon Neutral so was talking about reducing energy costs and planting trees. I think part of it is just “smoke and mirrors” as they were shutting down some data centres but then moving it to the Cloud, so the servers are still there, it’s just someone else’s problem.

The other aspect of why it’s all nonsense is how they always talk about using AI for everything but this is notorious for increasing energy usage.

I think it’s just the usual virtue-signalling propaganda.

We should all be aware that sustainability is high on our agenda! Living in an increasingly digitised world and working in the technology industry, I feel we should all be mindful of how much of an impact our digital activity has on the world we live in.

Did you know that a typical year of incoming emails adds 136 kg of emissions to a person’s carbon footprint, or the equivalent of driving 320 kms in an average car. Digital pollution is the greenhouse gases that come from building, delivering, and using digital technology. It makes up 4 per cent of the world’s global greenhouse emissions – double that of the global aviation industry – and this number is growing exponentially as our way of working and living becomes increasingly digital.
from UNICEF: Five tips for reducing your digital footprint.

Topics we have been exploring:

Reduce energy consumption of devices – Energy is the dominant contributor to climate change, accounting for around 60 per cent of total global greenhouse gas emissions.

Do we all shut down our laptops when not in use for long periods of time?

Should we make sure we close programs that we aren’t using?

Could we consider reducing the screen brightness?

Do we always leave devices plugged in at full charge? It might be better instead to charge for short and regular intervals as this also increases the battery life.

Reduce our use of email – As the above quote highlights emails contribute massively to digital waste.

We shared tips of how to reduce emails –

Do we need to ‘reply all’?

Do we need to send an email at all? Could internal conversations be held on Teams instead?

Could we make use of emoji reactions for internal responses?

Does the email need an attachment, or could we use a link to a shared online file instead?

We looked at ways to reduce emails in our inbox and make it easier to tidy up.

Do we have lots of emails that could be deleted? It’s possible to set filters to sort specific types of emails into folders and use auto-archiving settings to delete them at specific time intervals. This is particularly useful for our team where we have lots of automated emails which we don’t need to store for long periods of time. Creating rules to automatically delete these would make it easier for us to manage.

If emails need to be kept, could these be archived? This may be useful if they don’t need to be accessed often. Storing them elsewhere may mean less energy is used when loading Outlook and searching through emails. There are auto-archiving features to make this simple and less time consuming too.

Do we always unsubscribe from any emails we don’t need or want? The safest way to do this is to log in and adjust notification settings on your account e.g. unwanted reminders and adjusting Teams settings. When discussing this topic, it is worth reminding everyone to always be vigilant of the potential for any email to be a phishing attempt and not to risk clicking on any links from unknown senders.

Clean up old files – Data that are stored online take space on servers that require energy to be active 24/7.

“Whether it’s meeting our net zero targets, creating an inclusive working environment, or having strong and ethical governance practices – sustainability in all its forms helps drive us forward as a business and forms a key part of our strategy.”

We were encouraged to set a personal objective for the year based on Sustainability.
Suggestions include:

reducing your carbon footprint (through e.g. reducing your business travel or digital footprint)
volunteering with your local community using your paid volunteering days
championing equity and inclusion in your role, ensuring accessibility is considered in any output or practice
becoming an active member of an employee-led group or the Sustainability Community of Practice’

Even the Software Development process is sustainable. Really, it’s just more corporate buzzwords and meaningless jargon.

Sustainable Software Development lifecycle

There is a comprehensive reference architecture on Confluence covering account structures, principles, application architecture, data architecture, security architecture, standards & templates, sustainability, app launch, EDA and more.

The tech strategy and architectural runway is fully documented on Confluence covering all core technology and platform services, components and enablers. It is future proofed and covers all investment case technology needs, and product roadmaps.

Environmental Sustainability is close to my heart and is a critical strategy as we work towards Carbon Net Zero by 2040.

Closing Thoughts

I think the claim to be Carbon Neutral is mostly virtue-signalling and although they might come up with some schemes to reduce carbon emissions, it will mostly just be a box-ticking exercise and can just move the problems elsewhere. So the field staff may well have electric cars, and most people work from home. But since we aren’t just heating a single office, but hundreds of homes now; then we probably are using more energy overall. Then everyone is using AI for simple communication.

Code Review Argument: “Why are you reviewing!?”

There was a code review submitted in a project branch. I had no reason to review it because I wasn’t assigned to the project, but I often like to be nosey and see what is going into the releases.

I noticed a few classic mistakes like server-only code placed in “common“ that gets installed to both client and server when deployed. There was also a caching problem where the first call will store the data in the cache, then a call from a different user will then go into the cache and grab the other user’s data! It’s the classic mistake of forgetting about how the app servers are shared between many users and many organisations.

For years I have flagged these problems up. Maybe we should have it as part of an induction process to go through common misunderstandings. Anyway, I send them on to some developers (Dean and Mark) that I have discussed issues with or joked about them in the past. Each developer then decided to also leave comments on the review even though they also weren’t assigned to it.

In a private chat, Dean said “why isn’t the lead developer spotting these mistakes and teaching them?“.

I assumed he might have actually then put an official complaint in, because Gary, the Senior Developer assigned to the project; then left an angry comment.

“why are you commenting on a project level change? I thought you were struggling for time and this is a project branch that I haven’t yet reviewed”

The thing is, he hadn’t said that to Dean and I, but to the other developer Mark. It’s like maybe they had some kind of previous arguments and now it’s flared up.

Mark rightly responded:

“You’d added comments. This isn’t the place to debate such things, please contact me by message if you have a problem”

I think it could be the case that Gary hadn’t fully reviewed it, just glanced at it, left some trivial comments, and meant to come back. In my opinion, if someone does the review for you, then doesn’t that save you a job? Many developers seem to hate code reviews since they would rather be writing code, not reading it. So really he should be grateful. But he has taken it like a personal attack like we didn’t trust Gary to point out these major flaws in the code.

It’s also beneficial to spot problems as early as possible. There’s nothing worse than aiming to get the project in a release, then when you want to merge it in, then the experts then look at the code and tell you that it has major flaws and cannot be released. At least we have flagged it early in the project and they have plenty of time to address it.

Access To Live: Length

I needed to check the live databases in order to investigate a bug. I had to request access by filling in a form.

There was a field to specify how long you need access for.

Sometimes, you will know you just need 1 day, but other times, you might not know how long it is going to take to complete your investigation. As the saying goes “How long is a piece of string?“

It said on the form you can leave the date blank, and they will give 2 weeks by default. I was incredibly surprised by this.

A) You would think they would be really restrictive
B) It’s like they actually understand how you work!

I thought that would be the best option for me, so I left it blank and submitted it.

I then received an email, stating my request was incomplete and she needed to know how long I need access for before she can approve my request.

Annoyed at Autonomy

To illustrate how awkward it is these days to do something simple… we needed to disable a button, but it’s not clear to the user why the button is disabled. I quickly put a tooltip on the control.

I knew we needed approval from the UX team who are responsible for the “User Experience”, so I emailed them.

When our Product Owner was told, she was really annoyed and started moaning that I made a decision behind her back.

A decision hadn’t really been made, I was just exploring one simple option and trying to get things done. There was always the chance that UX wouldn’t agree with it, but it’s given them context and a possible solution.

The Product Owner didn’t like the tooltip at all. I did point out that other areas of the system do disable the button but don’t show a tooltip. So my button is an improvement that we show a tooltip – at least the users know why the button is disabled.

I suppose showing a tooltip for this disabled button is inconsistent UX, but that’s why I emailed the UX team. I know UX Team tend to hate “dynamic” UIs so don’t like things appearing/disappearing. This isn’t something we are removing, but just disabling/enabling.

After the Product Owner contacted UX, they wanted me to basically redo the dialog because other aspects don’t conform to their standards, but all that functionality has been around for years.

The bug/enhancement wasn’t actually reported by our users. It was just a Developer who decided it would be beneficial to change.

Conclusion

When there’s many people in charge of deciding what work needs to get done, and many people in charge of how things get implemented; making any change is a slow process and most things end up getting thrown on the backlog because the effort of implementing anything increases.

Retention Policy

After we got taken over, we were notified that our parent company has a “Retention Policy”. This is the time when information will be permanently deleted.

This affected emails, Teams messages, OneDrive files, and SharePoint data.

Emails	90 days
Archived Emails	3 years
Shared emails	3 years
Teams personal chats	90 days
Team Channel posts	3 years
OneDrive	5 years since modified
Sharepoint	1-5 years (decided via approval process)

When we were told this, we thought it was ridiculous. How many times has someone needed to dig up an old email to determine why code was written the way it was? How many times have we dug up an old Team chat to know how to fix a random configuration error that suddenly happened?

If they are deleted after 90 days, then we will lose a lot of information.

After raising concerns, we initially got pushback along the lines of “if it’s important, then it should be in a Team Channel or on Sharepoint“.

But even then it can still be deleted after a length of time. 3 years might sound a lot but it soon passes by.

It sounded like there was no warning when information was about to be deleted either. It just disappears silently and there’s nothing you can do about it if you didn’t copy it elsewhere.

There was more pushback when some long-standing employees said they would have to go through 10 years of emails to decide what could potentially be useful and what isn’t. After a lot of pushback, we got the email policy increased to 3 years.

Suspicious Parent Company Emails

When we got taken over, we started receiving emails from our parent company. However, we were not told what to expect in future emails and many look rather suspicious.

Some emails just go straight to Junk so they obviously haven’t communicated well with our IT department either.

As part of our security training, you are told to be wary of unexpected emails, then look for suspicious links, text calling for urgent action. These emails tick all the boxes.

One example of an email was titled “Secure: Your Security Access Request was completed“, then looked like an invoice with my name, date, a Request Id link; with a header containing the word SECURE in upper case. It had no information detailing what request was completed, making it required to click the link. I didn’t make a request, but it did say it was on my behalf.

The email address looked like our parent company’s main domain name. It was received in the same week as we got told about our new credentials to access some of their systems. So was this related or not?

When we don’t understand the new systems, know what we should be able to access, and who we need to communicate with, it would be prime-time for a malicious hacking group to try to socially engineer our credentials. This seems hypocritical when they made a big fuss when they were hit with a cyber-attack in recent times.

Project Gatekeeper

A few years ago, the company I work for was taken over. This was by a larger group of companies. One of the smallest companies they own was a company dealing with financial payments so was much more important than their size suggests.

My understanding that someone working for that company was “social engineered” and their password was accessed. This cyber-crime group that acquired the password then used it to install ransomware on the entire system. Sensitive information was believed to be stolen, and the systems were unable to be used; preventing millions of transactions being processed.

It was a massive hit to the reputation of the parent company, and cost millions paying out loans to those hindered, and compensation over the incident.

Even though it had nothing to do with our company, it caused instant fear that we could be next, therefore any security policy that could be changed was.

The stolen account didn’t have 2 factor authentication, but even if it did, the code could have also been socially engineered. I think it’s a bit naïve to assume that was the only reason it happened.

Even though we used 2FA on our accounts, products like Microsoft Teams asks you to log in then keeps you permanently logged in. So then they changed the policy so it asked you every day. As we found out, Microsoft Office doesn’t handle this well, sometimes struggling to log in to Teams and Outlook to start our days. I’m not sure what that was even trying to achieve, but it was a massive annoyance to everyone. It then got reverted after a week or so.

Other changes followed as part of what we called “The Gatekeeper Programme”.

Gatekeeper Programme Scope

Risk assess all practices, tools and techniques.
Prioritise security based projects
Create new practices, policies, process and control measures.
Improve security monitoring
Remove use of out-of-support products
Training to prevent against social engineering

What it really meant is we ended up switching to products used by the parent company, and we lost access to do certain activities. So our VPN software was changed, we had different Remote Desktop software and only certain people were allowed to use it.

In some ways this does make sense as it reduces the number of products that could have a vulnerability. Restricting privileges to only necessary staff members also reduces the number of people malicious groups can target.

Many of the changes seemed an over-reaction and the urgency we had to remove products was a massive hindrance on certain departments, mainly Group IT.

Unconscious Bias

There was a time where a group of people were hyping up “woke” topics, and the latest topic was “Unconscious bias” which is supposed to cause a certain degree of racism/sexism during the hiring or promotion process. Or maybe even leading to some microaggressions in meetings.

We were encouraged to watch a few courses on LinkedIn Learning, but it was not mandatory. Some of it was actually quite interesting.

There was one cringy moment where the presenter gave a trigger warning of sorts:

“if you feel an emotion, pause the video and deal with it. If you still feel the emotions, contact me and discuss it“

In my opinion, I think if you get overwhelmed with a simple LinkedIn Learning video, then you have bigger problems.

In my notes, I had written this claim but not sure what it means – because how do you even measure the bias:

“Research has shown that even a 1% bias in favor of promoting men changes the outcome.”

The following sounds like a decent philosophy though. If bias does exist then we do need to take it into account:

“By understanding that we’re all biased, we can make the decision to work together to be more conscious of our thoughts and actions when relating to others. Not only can we fix the current situation, we can then resolve not to do it again. Over time, it’s possible to learn to think and behave differently.”

She then makes the claim that even if you look at different aesthetics within a particular gender, you can notice trends which would suggest there is an unconscious bias at play:

“Blonde women earn 7% more than brunettes. Slim women make more money than obese.”

Some of the categories of bias are quite interesting. Halo bias probably does make a huge difference. You can say it’s like when you work with a Senior who you respect; whatever they claim in the next project you are tempted to back them and agree.

Halo bias – “admiring all of a person’s actions because of their praiseworthy actions in the past”
Perception Bias – “the tendency to form stereotypes and assumptions about certain groups that makes it difficult to make an objective judgment about individual members of those groups.”
Therefore it is difficult for women to be hired in gender perceived roles. E.g. software developer
Confirmation bias – “Seeking out evidence that confirms our initial perceptions, ignoring contrary information.” “We double-down and seek out information to justify our position.”
GroupThink – When the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in incorrect decision-making.
Performance Bias – Underestimate women’s performance but overestimate men’s. Men are often hired on future potential, women hired on past performance.
Attribution bias – Less likely to credit women for success, but more blame for failure. Women’s contribution is less valuable. Women are more likely to be interrupted when speaking.
Likability Bias – Expect men to be assertive so like them more when they are assertive, but have a negative response to women. Agreeable and nice is perceived as less competent so need to assert themselves to be effective, but then are less liked.
Maternal bias – motherhood is perceived as less committed and less competent. Strongest kind of gender bias. Lower performance ratings, and lower pay in future.
Affinity bias – gravitate to people like ourselves, dislike those that are different. More likely to give positive performance ratings to those that are similar. White men’s prominence means women and those of colour are negatively affected.
Double discrimination (intersectionality): Women, and of colour is double discrimination. 3+ minority attributes make people feel like they don’t fit anywhere.

“Woke” people seem to suggest that men are the problem when it comes to bias. However, I have seen claims that if you have an all-female panel they are often shown to be biassed towards hiring men. The claim was women don’t want to hire someone they perceive as a threat, or someone who is more attractive than them.

There was another LinkedIn course I watched that stressed the point that both genders show bias, sometimes in different ways.

There was a test where participants were shown pictures of men and women and they had to state (purely by stereotyping) if they associate them with “family” or “career”. Regardless of the participant’s gender, 76% of people associate women from the images with “family” rather than “career”.

There was also a claim which I would like to see what results back it up:

“Diverse teams tend to be more committed and work harder, and companies with more women in leadership tend to produce better business results.”

During the hiring process, there is some scope to anonymise it somewhat to try and remove any bias against gender or race, in an attempt to judge purely on merit.

New Comms Process

I’ve made many blogs about communication. It seems that over time, there can be a new tool that managers start using which then becomes the cool thing to communicate with. Email was always a popular way of sending the information to all. When messaging apps like Microsoft Teams or Slack were available, then these became the cool way, but it involves people subscribing to the channel in the first place. Then we had Social Media style apps, initially “Facebook for Work” and then Yammer which was recently renamed to Viva Engage. Then there’s documentation style websites like Confluence, Sharepoint.

There was one post that made me laugh where a manager highlights the problem of having too many apps which then people have their favourites and have different frequencies checking them. So he points out the absurdity of cross-posting, and wants to fix the problem by carrying on cross-posting, but mainly causing you to divert from one platform to another.

As one colleague hilariously pointed out:

“I’ve just followed a link posted to Teams to a Yammer post that contains a link to Confluence…”

Here is what the manager announced:

Hey everyone,
You might have noticed, during this quarter, that I have been trying out various different ways to get a message out to the whole department. I've put content on Confluence and Teams, and sent messages by Teams, Slack and Email cascade. The bottom line is, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to getting important info out smoothly.

But this is a problem we can solve. And it's a problem that we must solve: with this many people in the team, it is critical to have a way to announcements and updates out to everyone. So this is how it will work from now on:
You are reading this on Viva Engage. This is a new community set up specifically for long-form comms across the train. If you Follow this community you will get updates of new announcements. But I won't rely on just that - I will also send out notifications on Teams and Slack, with a link to new posts. I will also use Teams and Slack to post short-form updates that do not need a post on Viva Engage. So here is the call to action:
• I will commit that the leadership will use both Teams and Slack to send out department-wide notifications. As long as you look out on one or other of these channels, you will not miss out.
• I ask everyone to do this right now: whichever tool you prefer (Teams or Slack), make sure you have access to the right channel (see screenshot), pin it or star it, and make sure notifications are turned on.
For this first post, I will also send out an email cascade but in future I will drop this step. It's vulnerable to delays and with the other channels set up, we don't need this as well.

For the Viva Engage posts - please "like, share and subscribe"!! Let's make this a conversation
Thanks