The work ethic is not my major beef. I know that in some countries, it is illegal to work beyond a certain amount in a day and/or to work or prescribed holidays.
It is the lack of “engagement” and/or “interaction” that is mystifying. I mean, how can someone develop features and not ask about them and have a dialog with your customers about them before developing them? Makes no sense.
[quote name=‘tbirnseth’]The work ethic is not my major beef. I know that in some countries, it is illegal to work beyond a certain amount in a day and/or to work or prescribed holidays.
It is the lack of “engagement” and/or “interaction” that is mystifying. I mean, how can someone develop features and not ask about them and have a dialog with your customers about them before developing them? Makes no sense.[/QUOTE]
To be fair, they do have their "ideas’ forum now to seek input although their feedback and interaction leaves shall we politely say quite a bit of room for growth - smiling…
As for not working on holidays or overtime - that is a rare situation and if it is the case they should simply let us know so that we can understand.
Typically unless you are a minor or some unusual situation you can work overtime and on holidays with extra pay in most countries.
Perhaps someone can add more accurate information for Russia - which would be interesting to learn.
It does seem to be bewildering approach for a company to ignore the benefits of engagement with its customers. The don’t seem to have a solid grasp of the reality that in order to build an application that is reliable and suits the requirements of their customers, they need to engage with us in transparent dialogue on a regular and comprehensive basis.
The points about Russian labour laws (relatively few; rarely enforced compared to western Europe and the US)/ not working holidays and cultural norms might be a factor - but I don’t think they can explain away the very real problem of almost total lack of engagement.
Until recently, companies could get by well enough without doing so, but it’s simply no longer an option. I really wish that the CS Cart developers could understand that transparency and engagement with us would be a win-win in every respect. It would enable them to improve the development cycle and slash the amount of frustration their customers experience with CS Cart. Admittedly, it’s pretty good software, but it’s also very complex. As things stand, just a few power users on this forum seem to be carrying most of the support burden. I won’t even get started on the experiences I’ve had dealing with the paid for, 24 hour turn-around and often careless official support…
I would like to see the developers and support staff start to show us they realise that their customers haven’t just bought any old php script: we base the foundations of our online businesses on CS Cart and rely on it for our livelihoods.
If one of the staff happens to come across this post, please check out
Social, transparent customer engagement is essential to the future success of Simbirsk Technologies and CS Cart.
[quote name=‘cygnusbooks’]It does seem to be bewildering approach for a company to ignore the benefits of engagement with its customers. The don’t seem to have a solid grasp of the reality that in order to build an application that is reliable and suits the requirements of their customers, they need to engage with us in transparent dialogue on a regular and comprehensive basis.
The points about Russian labour laws (relatively few; rarely enforced compared to western Europe and the US)/ not working holidays and cultural norms might be a factor - but I don’t think they can explain away the very real problem of almost total lack of engagement.
Until recently, companies could get by well enough without doing so, but it’s simply no longer an option. I really wish that the CS Cart developers could understand that transparency and engagement with us would be a win-win in every respect. It would enable them to improve the development cycle and slash the amount of frustration their customers experience with CS Cart. Admittedly, it’s pretty good software, but it’s also very complex. As things stand, just a few power users on this forum seem to be carrying most of the support burden. I won’t even get started on the experiences I’ve had dealing with the paid for, 24 hour turn-around and often careless official support…
I would like to see the developers and support staff start to show us they realise that their customers haven’t just bought any old php script: we base the foundations of our online businesses on CS Cart and rely on it for our livelihoods.
If one of the staff happens to come across this post, please check out
Social, transparent customer engagement is essential to the future success of Simbirsk Technologies and CS Cart.[/QUOTE]
A good fair well thought out post.
Now if the developers care about their customers they will give a thoughtful and full response.
To say we do not check the forums is nonsense. this forum is quite small and checking daily would be a very small task if they cared about their customers or their own future profits.
I am 100% certain that if they quickly made the cart basically bug free and listened to half the ideas given to them again - quickly and without bugs.
The cart owners would become rich!
[QUOTE]If one of the staff happens to come across this post, please check out [/QUOTE] -the link didn’t show up form some reason, here it is again:
getsatisfaction.com
I find the user voice form to be a complete waste of time and a joke related to getting viable feedback.
- Any comment counts as a “vote for”. Even ones that say don’t waste your time.
- There is no dialog between development/marketing and the end users (merchants).
- Proposals are made specific to a particular situation. The “whole use case” (I.e. all instances/usages) is not addressed.
- there is no publication of specification or review process defined/utilized.
- It’s a one-way street.
They will be deploying 2.1 as cs-cart.com as their demonstration of “it works, so let’s release it”. Given that cs-cart provides service products only with limited options, configurablility and pricing models, I can only assume that the same weakeness will surface in 2.1 as did 2.0. It took up until about 2.8 for the system to become commercially stable. And the features provided in 2.0 are still not yet complete nor does the product meet the needs of many merchants (taxes, discounts, order data integrity).
The challenge of developing a multi-lingual shopping cart that is configurable to be accurately used in all countries is not only very ambitious, but almost impossible to accomplish.
2.0 should not be put to bed and effort shifted to 2.1 until 2.0 is proven to provide the basic functionality that a shopping cart is intended to provide and that all the features deployed in 2.0 are complete and fullly functional.
Just my two cents (as a customer).
tbirnseth-
I am not sure why you are so insistent that the UserVoice forum is useless. It appears to me that the developers are, in fact, responding to customer wishes. I, personally, would be making some different decisions regarding development plans but I don’t think you can say the developers are not responding to customer priorities.
I also find that communication is better now than it has been in the past. The Roadmap forum has proven pretty effective (well, we need to see the results in 2.1) for proposing a specification and soliciting feedback. From what I have seen this appears to be working.
Likewise, the Wishlist & Feature Requests forum is full of ideas. The real problem is that the UserVoice system has poor discussion tools and the forum has poor voting tools - hence the bifurcation of the process. I find this workable and a significant improvement over the previous burial of ideas in the Bug Tracker.
One correction is necessary: leaving a comment does not “vote” for an item. The votes shown for an item are the result of people explicitly casting some number of their votes for an idea. You can test this yourself: check the votes and number of supporters for an idea, then leave a comment and recheck these numbers - they will be the same. Having seen the back-end of the UserVoice system, I can assure you that it does not include any other “activity score” for ideas (although it does this for users).
As I said above, I would have made different development choices. For starters, I would never have undertaken the multi-vendor system at this point (guess I could be accused on being non-responsive to customers) which I am convinced is consuming resources better utilized elsewhere. On the other hand, the developers know their long-range goals and may have decided that it is easier to address these issues now rather than wait (especially given the likely impact to database design).
One thing I wish the developers would do is once-a-month dedicate some development effort to addressing the many smaller issues that do not garner the votes of whiz-bang new features. Sit one junior programmer down for a week each month to knock off a bunch of small stuff that would improve the usability of the software.
You are correct that many design choices appear to have been made based on a specific case rather than thinking through all the implications. I am encouraged by the fact that the developers chose to go for the more universal solution for taxes rather than quickly just providing a fix to meet the needs of a subset of their customers. I am taking this as an indication that they are starting to think in broader terms when designing stuff. Other examples of thinking “bigger” are the improvements to checkout and order placement - they solicited (and apparently approved) a lot of stuff that in times past would have been overlooked.
I think there is much room for improvement but I think we need to also acknowledge that things have improved.
Bob
I agree that something is better than nothing. But if I’m driving my car toward a cliff, improved brakes and no brakes doesn’t make much of a difference if the brakes won’t stop the car before reaching the cliff.
Regarding voting… How does one indicate that the suggestion is either a waste of time and/or that there are other things which should be addressed first?
Because someone reads something and goes “yeah, that would be cool” and votes for it doesn’t mean that it is really an important thing to do and/or that it fits within the architecture of the product.
I haven’t seen the developer feedback you’re talking about. In the Roadmap, it has ceased and in the other areas there is little dialog (like ask a question and get a response).
I guess I come from a professional culture whereby features/functions are proposed. They are evaluated by marketing and prioritized based on a marketing priority. The prioritized list is then reviewed with “key customers” who represent the user base and adjusted based on feedback. Then, plans are put in place to specify (in detail) how something will be implemented after verifying the “use cases” with the key customers. The resulting design and implementation plan is reviewed internally and merged into a release plan. The resulting implementation is then tested against the use-cases which have driven the test plans.
The documentation is evidence that there are no use-cases in place for most of the functionality of the product. Otherwise, they easily define the documentation. Countless software engineering studies show that using use-case modeling to define functionality is probably the greatest factor in “getting it right the first time” than any other method.
I agree that things are improved, but that doesn’t mean that they are complete or adequate.
I’m really not trying to vent and I do want to acknowledge the improvements… I just think that it’s very awkward to work with a company that is so disconnected from its customer base…