> BTW If you, dear reader, ever find yourself so frustrated with Cloudflare that you feel like your only recourse is a blog post... my email is jgc@cloudflare.com and I’m happy to hear from people.
I know that people will think it's great that you are doing this and I also know that you think it's good (for you) to have a feel for the issues that frustrate every day users. But I think it's not a great use of a company execs time and I am not even sure it's a good way to deploy resources at Cloudflare.
The reason is people will tend to (as a rule) do as little as they can themselves but then use as a hammer the court of public opinion to get something resolved.
You say 'ever find yourself so frustrated with Cloudflare' but you know that in itself is different for different people. What will happen is you will get people using you as a help desk and then after you don't help them as quickly as they think you should they will then follow up with a post, comment or story about how you did nothing.
Separately if someone is posting publicly about an issue (as this person is) and if you can verify that it's actually coming from the customer (I mean who says it is actually?) I don't think you need them to say it's ok to resolve online. In fact to me it's the opposite. You take the time to reach out publicly and you take what follows good or bad even calling you out (the customer yes you can do that by the way) if you think they didn't put the appropriate effort into finding an answer.
I disagree with you. It matters enormously that people like me are available. Sure there are time wasters who’ll send me email. But I don’t care. Dealing with a small number of real customers doesn’t take a lot of my time and matters.
Everyone optimizes for the worst case. They think “if I give out my email I’ll get tons of useless email”. I can assure you I get 10x the crap sent to me on LinkedIn than via direct emails from customers or others.
My little firm is nothing like the scale of CF but I do the same and have dropped my email address around a fair bit. I do get some pretty interesting missives that make it past the filters but signal to noise is very high in my inbox.
I deleted my Linkedin account well over a year ago and I still get emails from them saying my profile is being viewed. Tossers.
> I know that people will think it's great that you are doing this and I also know that you think it's good (for you) to have a feel for the issues that frustrate every day users. But I think it's not a great use of a company execs time and I am not even sure it's a good way to deploy resources at Cloudflare.
As a counter example, Jeff Bezos (whose time may be worth more than anybody else's) famously audits his email for customer complaints and occasionally derails an organization for a day or two in order to figure out what happened. He stands behind this practice and has said that he often picks out cases where the anecdotal complaint is counter to data that he's been presented, and that more often than not the anecdotes are correct and find a shortcoming in the data. IMO it also demonstrates a culture of caring and following up about anecdotes to others whose time is worth less than his own.
> As a counter example, Jeff Bezos (whose time may be worth more than anybody else's) famously audits his email for customer complaints and occasionally derails an organization for a day or two in order to figure out what happened.
Is that why Amazon is growing more and more notorious for selling fraudulent items over the years?
I know that people will think it's great that you are doing this and I also know that you think it's good (for you) to have a feel for the issues that frustrate every day users. But I think it's not a great use of a company execs time and I am not even sure it's a good way to deploy resources at Cloudflare.
The reason is people will tend to (as a rule) do as little as they can themselves but then use as a hammer the court of public opinion to get something resolved.
You say 'ever find yourself so frustrated with Cloudflare' but you know that in itself is different for different people. What will happen is you will get people using you as a help desk and then after you don't help them as quickly as they think you should they will then follow up with a post, comment or story about how you did nothing.
Separately if someone is posting publicly about an issue (as this person is) and if you can verify that it's actually coming from the customer (I mean who says it is actually?) I don't think you need them to say it's ok to resolve online. In fact to me it's the opposite. You take the time to reach out publicly and you take what follows good or bad even calling you out (the customer yes you can do that by the way) if you think they didn't put the appropriate effort into finding an answer.