Nobody likes to be criticized
That's only mostly true. It may not always be enjoyable, but there are plenty of situations in which criticism is desirable. Most musicians and filmmakers would take a critic's review over the alternative of being completely ignored.
At work, frequent and early performance feedback is better than waiting for your next official review. You know, that awkward conversation where you're expecting disaster at the end of every sentence from your manager's mouth, like an LLM trained purely on Marvin.
Criticism can inform your decisions, shift your direction, and deepen your understanding. It can also crush your spirit and restrict your growth. Those two poles of critical response don’t necessarily correlate to negative and positive comments — the most helpful commentary on your work can also be the most negative. The truth really can hurt.
In customer support we constantly invite criticism, explicitly asking customers to rate their support interactions with smiley faces or stars or thumbs.
We throw open our doors for people to charge through, wielding complaints like pitchforks. It can be risky: haters, famously, are gonna hate5. But closing the door doesn’t make the valid criticisms disappear…it just means you don’t see them anymore.
We want people to tell us what’s not working, what is confusing, what felt bad to them about our service. We need to know before we can fix it. If all our customers were politely, stereotypically British, pretending everything is wonderful even as our web app inexplicably sets their home on fire every time they log in, we’d not be in business long. Thank goodness we also have more...American customers ;)
So which complaints should we listen to? Receiving and handling criticism of our service is unavoidably an act of judgment. Is this complaint specific to this person? Is it something we can even change? Is this really a complaint about the product, and not the support?
In support we're often judged by the useful-but-limited metric of “satisfaction” and are frustrated by bad ratings driven by things outside our control. Although we're considerably less bothered by good ratings that are about the high quality of the products and services we support.
A sustainable, useful feedback system requires that the support team are safe enough and valued enough to be able to record the truth of customer feedback and pass that on to the appropriate people and teams without fear of repercussions.
Without that safety people will seek to protect themselves and their jobs, hiding or minimizing feedback. So start with safety, and then identify your most helpful critics.
A good critic, one who shares your general worldview and can identify problems clearly and constructively, can push you further than you thought was possible.
Shake it on.
5 hate, hate, hate, hate
