Feedback shows the tip of an iceberg

If there's something wrong with your website, you can drive so much traffic away and not even realise it. Let's say that 100 people try to make use of a resource that you have mis-labelled. Only 10 will actually find it, and of those only 1 will take the time to email and let you know.

How can I be sure of these statistics? I can't .... but I do know that a high proportion of traffic gets lost when something goes wrong, and that only a tiny proportion of people who still get through but with difficulty will actually write and let you know. This "square rule" makes all feedback received rather special and valuable.

I was reminded on this overnight - a new user to our forum had signed up using an email address which implied to me that any administration emails weren't going to be read. I wrote him a note (in the circumstances via the public board!) asking him to make amends; to my (I confess) surprise, he did reply - observing that no-one else had ever actually looked at it before. I'm going to disagree with his observation. I'm guessing that the majority haven't looked, but that a minority have. Of that minority, the majority have just rolled their eyes / deleted his posts / taken no further action. And I'm, it seems, the only one who has gotten back to him. He probably doesn't realise that he's alienated an "on the ball" minority.
(written 2004-11-22, updated 2006-06-05)

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G501 - Well House Consultants - Customer Service
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  [717] A customer service company - (2006-05-11)
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Some other Articles

Spelling and grammar
Trawling our site to prevent student copying
Technical Weekend / Geekmas
Conversion and coercion in Java
Feedback shows the tip of an iceberg
Staff theft
PHP v Java
Short underground journeys and a PHP book
Passing arrays to procs in Tcl
Fair and Simple