Review business operations impact before launching features / changes

While we appreciate the improvements in the platform, it doesn’t seem like much thought was given to business operations impact of our customers. Yes, we are your customers (agencies), but our customers are ultimately the end-users.

Recently, new campaigns were launched. While the new campaigns are far better, there were no options for businesses on the platform to keep legacy plans. No date was given when the old would be deprecated, and there wasn’t an option for businesses to use both at the same time…

This pissed off a lot of my customers. And I knew it would. After all, they’re running their businesses & very involved, and now they can’t even download old data from the old campaigns (recipient & campaign details).

I’d say I’m asking that, in the future, if there is a big change to a feature where something will no longer be available or disrupt the way a business may currently be doing something we:

1. Get feedback from the agencies in how this might impact current customers, and how that might be minimized / eliminated.

2. Offer the option to keep the legacy feature in tandem with the new feature, if it’s warranted.

3. Give solid dates & timelines on deprecations, or leave it open-ended based on client feedback.

4. Allow a smoother transition. In this case, could we simply have “upgraded” existing campaigns instead of deleted them altogether?

Now that EMR is growing in size, I think more consideration will need to be given about structural feature changes that might impact a customer’s operation. If we don’t, it’ll decrease customer satisfaction, cost our customers money, and ultimately hurt our reputation & ability to retain those customers.

Thanks for the work you’ve done on this! Please let me know how I can help in the future.