10 years ago, when users ran into a software problem, they just contacted the developer for help, resulting in a useful conversation where the user got his problem solved and the developer got useful information about possible bugs.

However, nowadays a user is more likely to just complain about the problem in a public place like Facebook, Twitter, the App Store or the Android Market. No request for help, no conversation and therefore: no solution.

The App Store Attitude

Let’s call this behavior the “App Store Attitude“, because it’s most apparent for mobile apps, where users, instead of contacting Support, immediately jump to “warning other users” by posting a review in the App Store or Android Market.
I must say though, that I am finding that this attitude is spreading beyond the App Store and is also starting to happen for desktop tools and for web applications.

The Collectorz.com situation

Before I discuss how we’re trying to fight the App Store Attitude, let me explain the Collectorz.com situation and our mobile apps a bit more.

You see, we’re not selling 99 cents apps, discardable gimmicks or even games. For that category of apps, I can kind of understand the App Store Attitude. If you buy an app like that, and it crashes, has some kind of problem or even just sucks, then yes… I can accept that the user just moves on, finds an alternative or just forgets about it. For 99 cents, it’s not worth doing the conversation with those pesky programmers.

However, at Collectorz.com we are selling seriously expensive software solutions. Our mobile apps cost $9.99 and on top of that, these apps can only be used by people who already own our Windows or Mac software (a $49.95 purchase). So our mobile app users have spent at least 60 bucks with us, but most users own multiple $49.95 products and one of our barcode scanners (ranging from $19.95 to $144.95). They have a serious amount of money invested in our stuff, not something to discard easily.

Which also means that users who buy our mobile apps already know who we are, know how to find our website, and most importantly, they know that we can easily be contacted through our Support Page, in our Forum, on our Facebook page (17,500 fans) or via Twitter (2,500 followers).

So in short: our app buyers have spent serious money with us, they have all reasons to get their problems fixed, and they know how to contact us.
But still, as soon as a problem occurs with their mobile app, most of them immediately resort to the reviews section and just “state” their problem, anonymously.

Fighting the App Store Attitude – first attempt

In the comments on my previous post about this, some commenters (Rico, Jerry) suggested that the App Store and Android Market were to blame for this, because both only provide a standardized way to post reviews and do not offer a similarly standardized way of contacting the developer for support. And I agree, it would be great if it was more easy for users to get in contact with the developers.

But other commenters (Steven, Geoff) suggested that as long as the App Store does not provide an easy way to contact Support, why not build that into your app yourself. Provide a feedback button that makes it dead-easy to contact you and start that conversation.

Great idea, so today we did just that, we added a new Help button in the toolbar of our 5 iPhone apps.
The Help button pops up a little message that says “Looking for help?” with 2 buttons: “Check the FAQ” and “Contact Support”. The FAQ button opens Safari on the correct FAQ page, the Contact button opens the user’s Mail app on a new email, with our support email address and Subject already filled in, ready to fire away.

Let’s see if this helps. I hope the ease of contacting us will prevent most users from posting their problem in the reviews section. Of course, this solution won’t work if the app immediately crashes on start-up (no way to reach the Help button). Oh well…

I will of course report back with our findings.

However, here’s what we’re seeing more and more nowadays, especially for our mobile apps, but it’s becoming more common for our desktop apps too:

A user runs into a problem, and instead of asking for help, immediately jumps to complaining about it in a public place like the App Store, the Android Market, Facebook or Twitter. Just stating the problem… no request for help, no conversation and therefore in most cases: no solution.

No conversation, no solution

Of course, getting bad reviews of your software is annoying. But the real issue here is the lack of conversation. Without a conversation:

• There is no way to help the user to actually solve his problem, simply because you can’t contact him.
• There is no way to fix actual bugs in your software, because you can’t learn what the problem is exactly, what might be causing it, how to reproduce it, etc… Making it next to impossible to fix the bug, let alone help the user (and possible other users running into the same bug!).

What’s happening here? And why?

Has the reputation of software companies (or internet companies in general) become so bad that users don’t even bother to ask for help anymore?

Some users at least don’t seem to expect any useful help. Instead:

• They’re just stating the problem or complaining about it.
  No questions, no request for help, or even an expectation of a fix.

• They’re addressing other users, asking “Is anyone else having this problem?”
  What’s that about? How is finding other with the same problem going to help you? Why not report the problem to the company directly so that they can actually do something about it? (this one is especially common on public Forums and Facebook).

• Or this weird one we’re often seeing:
  “Why isn’t it possible to …?” (often followed by something that is possible).
  I don’t get it. How is knowing “why” gonna help you? Don’t you just want us to help you make it possible?

Or has “warning other users about this piece of shit” become more important than actually getting your own problem solved?

Typical “App Store Attitude”. I admire the altruism, but think about it… if you help the software companies actually fix the problem… isn’t that more helpful for other users?

Or is this like, I’ll complain about the problem in public so then “they” will have to listen to me and do something about it.

I can understand and accept this one, but only in cases where it really is a last report to get the company to listen and act. But come on, be fair and at least try the normal support channels first.

Some examples

Here’s some example one-star “reviews” from the Apple App Store and the Android Market. Interestingly, none of these reviews were posted under the user’s real names…

Crashes Constantly
This would be better if it didn’t crash completely after every few comics scanned.

Garbage
This use to work and no it won’t work on my itouch!!!!!!!!!! WTF!!!!!!!! Seriously and their support is non existent!!!!! want my money back for this pos!!!!!

New update crashes at start-up!
App is good, but new version crashes on iPhone 4. No testing prior to posting? WTF.

Doesn’t Work
For me, in my phone, The latest version is broken. It just crashes

Needs fixing
The search feature does not work!

Waste of money
this is no comic app

FYI: each and every one of these “problems” could have been solved with one short email from our support guys. Except that last one maybe, but we’ll never know…

Technical

Multi-platform development
One of the advantages of web-app development is that you can serve users on all platforms with one code base. We invested a lot of time and money in creating Mac editions of our main 3 products, but for the Connect products we don’t have to. It even works on Linux
Of course, web-development has it own problems: getting your pages to look the same in all browsers. This can be a nightmare, especially if you try to support IE6. But our lead web-developer Robbert had a lot of experience in this area, so we’ve got it covered.

Maintenance and software updates
For online applications, all code runs on your server, which makes it possible to do live fixes and implement small improvements. As soon as you put the new code up on the server, every user is running the latest version. No builds, releases or uploads for you, no downloads and installs for the users. Quick and easy.
However, it’s important to stay alert though and keep rigorously testing your code before it goes live. Because it’s so quick to do fixes, it’s easy to get careless.

The same goes for adding new features, you can do so continuously. There is no reason to “group” enhancements and features into minor builds and major updates. For our Windows and Mac apps, we always try to keep the frequency of maintenance builds as low as possible, because it takes at least an hour to safely release a new stable build. Also, we often with-hold major new features for the next major upgrade, so that we can charge an update fee for it. For online apps, you’re usually charging a monthly subscription fee which includes all updates, so you are freed of the “major update cycle”.

There’s a catch though:
For downloadable, client-side software, users always have the choice of not upgrading to the latest version. Either because they don’t need the new features or because they don’t like the changes you made. Even (or especially!) if the changes are cosmetic.
For web-apps, users don’t have that choice. When you add a feature or change the look and feel of your app, it’s immediately live for all users, whether they like it or not. So for online apps, you should think a little longer before you make changes or add stuff that not every user may like.
(At Collectorz.com, we have removed features from our apps a couple of times, because we found that our software would be better without them. Less is more… If this generated complaints from users, I could always tell them to just downgrade to the older version. Not possible for our online Connect service.)

Live stats on usage
Another thing that has proven useful, for both technical and marketing reasons, is the ability to get live statistics on how users are using your software. Which features they are using, the sizes of their databases, the problems they are running into. Good data to have.

Privacy, security and data safety

For online apps, all user data is stored on your servers. Apart from the technical issues, like hosting, bandwidth, performance and disk space, this also causes some interesting new areas of “concern”:

Privacy and security
If you store user data that could be regarded as personal, then you’d better make sure your server and software are secure and this data cannot be accessed by anyone who is not supposed to see it. And even if you are fully secure, it’s still wise to have a good EULA and Privacy Policy in place. For Collectorz.com Connect, we hired a lawyer specialized in this stuff. Better safe than sorry.

Data safety
Even if the data is not of a personal nature, you still want to take good care of it. For offline software, the user is responsible for his own data and for having backups of it. But online, you are responsible. You really won’t want to loose or corrupt the data of your customers. For Connect, we have implemented a backup scheme that makes a local backup of all user data on a daily basis. And before every risky software update, we make an extra backup, just in case.

Customer Support

Another great thing about web-based applications is the advantages for customer support.

The first advantage is that all users are running the same version, the latest and greatest version that is. No problems with users running into bugs that you fixed ages ago, just because they neglected to update their software.

Also, the user’s software and their data is on your server, so if a user reports a problem you can simply log in to his account and take a look. In general, once you can reproduce a problem, you’re more than halfway to fixing it. And online, most issues are instantly reproducible, even user data dependent problems (and we all know what a nightmare these can be).
In many cases, you can even immediately fix the problem for them or help them live to accomplish a tricky task. Imagine how happy your customers are if you tell them:
“Just hit refresh in your browser now and it’ll be fixed”.

Sales

Last but not least: our experience selling online software, or, to be more precise, selling software subscriptions. Because that is the main difference: you are selling a subscription-based service, not a software product for a one-time purchase price. Huge difference, both for you and for your customers.

Pricing
Of course, the first question you run into is pricing. For regular, client-side software, picking a good price is the most difficult marketing decision already, but I found that I had even more problems deciding on the best price for the Connect subscription fees. And, to be honest, I don’t think I’m there yet.

We started out with a $40 yearly fee, plus a $30 setup fee. For existing customers, we had a 50% discount on the first year and they didn’t have to pay the setup fee.
Soon after launch, we dropped the setup fee entirely, as I felt it didn’t really help to attract new customers to the service ($70 just to get started is simply too much).

Later on, I added the possibility to pay for just 3 or 6 months. At the same time, I started presenting the fees differently. I now list the “regular price” as $4.95 per month (which is indeed what you pay if you just subscribe for 3 months), plus I present the 6 and 12 month subscription prices as “volume discounts”. For instance:

One Year Subscription: Regular Price: $59.40, Discount: $19.45, Now: $39.95

This seems to work a lot better. We are now seeing new users sign-up for all 3 subscription levels (3, 6 or 12 months).

The funny thing about subscription fees is that users seem to think about them differently. I mean, sell a $50 software product and nobody asks what you need that money for, or what you are going to use it for. But ask a $39.95 yearly subscription fee for an online, hosted application and people suddenly start thinking about where that money is going, whether hosting their data online is really that expensive. While the same people never seem to be having problems paying $50 for your Windows software, plus $25 per year for major upgrades.

Here’s an example of one user’s feedback on our Connect pricing:

You want to charge $39.95 a year to simply host LINKS for us in your database (with a subset of personal information). Yes, if I order before October 31st, I get it for $19.95 for this year. Let’s move past the marketing ploys for now because even that is a lot to charge for LINKS and TEXT to be hosted on your servers, especially since I pay $39.95 a year to host UNLIMITED data with UNLIMITED bandwidth and GIGS in mySQL tables with my current web host provider. That of course is in addition to the over 200 GB of FREE data I host on Windows Live and other related resources.

We have seen several forum posts and emails along the same lines. All from existing customers, who are used to our pricing for our Windows and Mac apps. I don’t expect this to be much of a problem for new customers who start off with the online service.

Selling to existing customers
Which brings me to selling Connect to our existing customers. As I posted before, this was one of our goals when designing Connect: to be able to sell it as a sharing / online publishing add-on to users of the Windows and Mac OS X edition. We invested a lot of time creating a smart two-way syncing system, so that users can synchronize their collection data between their Connect account and their local database. Cool stuff.

Up till now, we have sold a Connect subscription to about 4% of all customers owning a license for the latest version of Movie Collector (Windows or Mac). Not bad, but I was expecting to sell more in the first couple of months. Now there are still some limitations in the usage of Connect, especially related to the syncing system, so I expect to sell some more once we resolved all of these. Maybe tweak the pricing…

Selling to new customers
We haven’t sold Connect to many new customers yet. I have just started slowly promoting our Connect editions to new customers using Google Adwords. Slowly, because the Connect website hasn’t received my usual level of tweaking and tuning to optimize its conversion rate. I don’t want to risk loosing too many regular Adwords sales because the Connect traffic isn’t converting yet.
But as I said in my Art of Ignoring presentation, one needs traffic to measure and optimize conversions, so I guess I will have to take that risk soon and start directing a lot of costly Adwords traffic in the Connect direction. Scary…

I will let you know how this is working out. Hopefully I will be able to present some data in my ESWC presentation in a few weeks. See you there.

We decided that AJ should spend more time creating videos and that we should start looking for an extra customer support employee.

However, Sytske and I are quite busy at the moment. We didn’t feel like going through heaps of applications and spending hours talking with applicants. So we made up some “hoops” that applicants would have to jump through. Nothing complicated, just to make sure they were able to read and follow some simple instructions. We also included a real customer question for them to answer.

Here’s a quote from our job description on Monsterboard (posted July 1st):

Interested?
Upload your cover letter and updated CV (both in English) to Google Docs, in one document. Use “[Your Name] Wants The Job” as the document title.
Then share it with jobz at collectorz dot com.

Make sure to answer the following customer question in your cover letter:

“I have already added 1,723 DVDs to Movie Collector. Now I want to set the Purchase Store field of all entries to “Amazon”. I am not looking forward to editing each and every movie, one by one. Is there a quicker way?”

Here’s the results after six days: :

• We received 18 applications
• Fifteen of those were either sent by just hitting the Apply Directly button at Monsterboard or emailed to our jobz email address. None of those answered the support question. (Some of them didn’t even bother to write a cover letter)
• Only five applicants used Google Docs to share their application doc with us.
• Four of those had named their document right (“Johnny wants the job”)
• These four all answered the customer question, but only two had understood the reason for this assigment and had actually written a full response email, including a nice introduction:
  

  “Dear Mr. Hoogerdijk,
  Thank you for your e-mail today. I understand that you would like to modify the purchase store field for your DVD collection.”

  and a friendly ending:

  “If this does not answer your question, or you would like more detailed instructions, please let me know.
  Best regards”

So we just invited those two for a job interview. We spoke with the first guy yesterday and he’s great. We’re talking to the second guy tomorrow.