Microsoft Listens

Hi Chris, I run a small in team in DevDiv that is responsible customer connection across the division. Our scope includes things like closing the customer feedback loop, aka using Ladybug / ProductFeedback / Connect to make our products better and customers feel more a part of the process and more satisfied with the outcome.

I’d love to understand your concerns about Connect better. On the IE7 issue, I happened to talk to an MVP last night who mentioned this and I pinged the Connect team about it a little while ago. I know that’s going to get fixed pretty dang quickly.

It’s actually dumb that we have two feedback systems, and we’re in the process of getting to one that has the best attributes of both. Connect offers some things that PFC doesn’t. PFC handles some things better. Instead of building/maintaining two, we need to move to one that works well. I expect that will happen over the next six months, but the key thing is that we don’t cause a significant setback for the communities using either tool today. There’s a very active work effort right now between the Ladybug team, my team and the Connect team to get us to a great feedback experience that we all feel good about.

Beyond just the tool, Soma has asked us to help the other groups in the company be successful and learn from the experience here in DevDiv. To that end I recently met with the Windows team and compared some statistics on thing like fix rates, duplicates, etc. across the two sets of customer feedback. While we care about the tool experience - there are things in PFC/Ladybug that have been there forever that just drive me nuts - in the end I think what matters most is whether we listen to, respond to, and act on the feedback. Teams like Windows are earlier in the process than we are and not doing quite as well yet. But they want to, and by taking advantage of our learnings (some positive, some negative) they will catch up quickly.

The company’s intent is to provide an interface that makes the process easy (and not frustrating) for customers, to use this across most/all products (I qualify that only because I haven’t spoken to all groups), and to ensure that the feedback is prioritized as high or higher than other considerations. You are completely right - we are not there yet. But there’s a lot of working happening to get us there.

Mark Cliggett
Group Program Manager
DevDiv - Microsoft