James Siminoff RSS

I am currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Unsubscribe.com the former CSO of Ditech Networks Nasdaq (DITC) the founder and former CEO of PhoneTag, founder/principal in NobelBiz and founder of GRID.com. This blog is about my life as a serial entrepreneur, husband, traveler, inventor and father.

jsiminoff@PhoneTag.com













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May
19th
Mon
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Do customers really know what they want?

In listening to customer requests for new features you have to be very careful in my experience to sift through what customers want and how it effects the experience of the product.

When you set up a PhoneTag account by default we do not send SMS of the transcription to the customer.  We offer this option but it is opt in only.  That is because we feel that currently SMS, in the way that we do it, is not the best representation of the experience.  We offer it only because for some customers that is the only way to get the text of the transcription to their mobile.

I was on the phone with a customer (who also happens to be a friend of a friend) and asked him why he ended up getting rid of the service.  He told me that in the end he did not like the SMS delivery.  When he asked me a while back to turn on the SMS delivery I urged him not to but he insisted so we turned it on for his account.

This experience reminded me how I have to really be careful in what options we offer to the customer because in the end if the customer has a bad experience it will tarnish the whole product even if they were partly responsible for choosing the options that made the experience bad. 

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