THE VA CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Amazon has long touted its commitment to the customer experience, and its employees will repeat the mantra – without much prompting – linking the company’s success to its focus on ” what its customers want.” The company has developed a customer experience apparatus to support tangible products, like books, tools, and beauty-supply materials. Its e-commerce investments have made Amazon Web Services (AWS) an industry leader, with near continual iterative improvement of features to enhance the shopping/consumer experience. The company has zealously defended the credibility of the Amazon Product Review system. In fact, Amazon has sued Amazon sellers who purchased fake reviews as well as the website operators that sold the reviews and the individuals who authored them.
In these and other ways, Amazon has publicly demonstrated its commitment to the customer experience and more specifically to the accuracy of customer reviews. But its current customer experience has evolved to support the interests of static products that come off of assembly lines. Such products are consistent over time, ensuring that six month old reviews have relevance to the today consumer.
But do software products served up by AWS fall into this category?
AWS is a wonderful tool, one that supports iterative software development beautifully. As Alexa skills developers, we continually make use of AWS to tweak our skills based on real-time usage reports. We strive to ensure that what we serve up through AWS today is better than yesterday’s offering. And last week’s and last month’s and last year’s. All of which means that on a fundamental level, we are delivering an-ever improving customer experience with each iteration.
Yet our Alexa skills reviews do not reflect this reality. Instead they report on out-of-date histories, which serve to distort the customer experience. Customers miss out on relevant information that would inform decision-making. (Please see The Information article “Poor Reviews are No Joke for Some Developers” for more examples.) The question is how to proceed. How much should customer reviews reflect the current reality of an evolving product? When would out-of-date reviews be discarded? On a set time schedule, a la eBay or perhaps after major software releases, a la Google? What are Alexa skills developers to do in the interim?
