Passivity Toward Clients
Back around Christmas I got a Samsung Galaxy Active 2 watch to replace my old Garmin Vivofit. The watch is really nice, it has completely replaced my Garmin devices including a 230 running watch – so much better than that.
But it has one really strange problem that I encountered the first time I used my ski machine.
The watch connects to Samsung Health on a phone. I like this better than Garmin’s Connect dashboard.
In the watch when you work out, you can choose from a lot of different workouts from walking to running to lifting to hiking to swimming… many others. There’s an ‘Other Workout’ that I use for gardening and yard work.
However – in Samsung Health (phone app) there are hundreds of activities to choose from. Only a tiny number are actually available in the watch.
There’s no way to add one workout type, the way you add an app or widget to the watch. There’s no way to create a custom workout in the watch.
This seems to me really odd, that such a great watch with so many health features has this severe limitation. Cross country skiing would work great for my ski machine. It’s in the app, but not available on the watch.
When I contacted their support and asked about this, they cheerfully told me to put in a feature request. Here is the thread in the Samsung user community regarding the missing workouts on the watch. It was started just over a year ago and has 8 pages of users wondering why a seemingly basic feature is missing on this high-end, rather expensive health-focused watch. Samsung support marked the issue ‘solved’ on the same day it was posted, but it has never been ‘solved’ or addressed since by Samsung.
That’s passivity toward customers.
A lack of concern over a key issue that affects a lot of their watch users who have a genuine need for a basic feature.
This week I got a new password manager that has features I need for handling particular business data. It’s a lot better than my previous one, and offers an important feature that lets me customize templates to hold my data in a really organized way. That’s great!
However, as you might imagine, business data might change from time to time. Although you can delete these custom templates, you can never edit them.
So if for example you eventually need to remove a few fields or add a few fields to your custom template, you can’t. Period. You have to first:
- Create a new custom template.
- Manually copy all the info for all the custom notes you’ve created into the new custom template – if you have 500 notes, you have to do this 500 times.
- Then delete the old custom template.
Just like with the Galaxy watch, this edit feature has been requested by users. Not just for 1 year. It’s been a feature request since 2016.
There are a number of threads in their forum asking for this feature. A few of the larger ones have 50+ users involved. So far, I have not seen a single response in any of these forum threads by the password manager support team.
This is, again, an example of a company being passive towards users asking for what should be a basic feature.
In addition, the documentation I’ve read on the company website regarding this and other features is from 2016. Not updating docs is also a sign of passivity.
When I contacted them, they told me:
“We do appreciate your comment and added feedback, and this could be forwarded to our dev team as a feature request. Rest assured I will pass this along to our dev team so they can review, though, I cannot guarantee that this will be added.”
I’m not hopeful that it will ever happen. But at least I know upfront that I’m dealing with a company that really has demonstrated very little concern or interest in its users at least regarding this particular problem. I know that I may be on my own or out of luck if I do have an issue.
I never want my clients to feel this way about Red Kite. I try really hard to always put myself in the client’s position when they contact me about an issue or question, and to do everything I can to give them the best answers possible. Active listening is always better than passive head-nodding.
And I’m thankful that the vast majority of companies that I deal with as a business owner are not passive. They are very interested in solving problems for their customers as quickly as possible – they’re responsive, they actually listen, and they try to come up with the best answers they can. That’s how it should be.