Introduction.
Developing “Mia,” a talking cat-shaped robot that speaks various dialects.
I was looking at Mia’s X yesterday and the following X post caught my eye! We need to address this as soon as possible (sweat)”.
We immediately decided to hear about the current problems with X’s DM.
Email forwarding misconfiguration
Here is the actual exchange that took place at the hearing.
This was the first case we had ever received an inquiry about a case where the download stopped in the middle due to switching personalities or dialects.
I thought, “Huh? I thought I had set up mail forwarding so that inquiry e-mails were delivered to my Gmail,” I thought, and opened my mail server to find that a similar inquiry had already been received a few days earlier.
I am very sorry for what I have done and will review and reconfigure the email forwarding settings again and continue to conduct hearings with X’s DM.
It seems that it is not quite straightforward, so we are going to ask for your registered email address. If we know your email address, we can use the server logs (Amazon CloudQatch) to find out what is going on.
Consult with engineers in real time
Mia and I were developing the software with another engineer, and we communicated the status of the user’s problem to the engineer in real time in Slack.
I went to bed at midnight after asking for the user’s e-mail address, but the engineer continued to investigate and respond until about 3 am (I can’t thank him enough), and when I woke up in the morning, the following message had been received and also responded to. It was too much.
The user was then asked to switch the phrase type again, and this time it succeeded!
I was relieved.
To be honest, it could have been a complaint, including the slow initial response by the customer service due to not checking the e-mail, but the user happened to be a kind-hearted person and saved the day. However, the user was a kind-hearted person, and we were able to save the day.
How will we handle customer service in the future?
Although the resolution of the error itself was good, the customer response, including the inadequate mail forwarding settings, was a challenge that remains to be addressed.
Therefore, we decided to implement the following two solutions
- Google Form for bug/error inquiries in the application.
- Mia community established
(1) Set up a Google form in the application for bug and error inquiries.
In order to identify the cause of the problem as quickly as possible, the Google form will ask the user to enter the necessary information to determine the cause.
In the case of Mia, as long as we know your registered e-mail address, we can find out all the information about the Mia unit you are connected to and the server logs, so we ask you to enter only your e-mail address.
In addition to that, we will ask you to send us a text or photo-video of the problem. We have created the following Google form.
2) Set up a Mia community (Discord)
We also decided to set up a community regarding Mia.
There are several community tools such as Slack, Discord, and LINE open chat, so I was torn, but this time I decided to try Discord first, which is anonymous and can be divided into different channels for different purposes.
The purpose of this page is not only for 1:1 inquiries about problems and errors, but also for users to communicate with each other and share requests for improvement.
From the app, we also created a flow line to the Discord community.
Will be released in the next app update.
We won’t know how familiar Discord is with Mia’s buyers (although I think it is becoming more popular among gamers and the younger generation) until we try it, but for now, we’ll try to operate with it.
Conclusion
We are very grateful that this user inquiry helped us to understand the inadequacies of our current implementation and to review our customer service.
We will continue to improve our services.
P.S. The user himself is the built-in battery type!
As a side note, I was personally most surprised that this user purchased his own lithium-ion batteries and made them rechargeable.
Currently, Mia is not sold in a rechargeable format, but rather in a method that connects to a USBC cable. This is because of cost considerations and because we were not sure how much need there would be for carrying it around.
However, the board itself was developed to support the built-in battery type with lithium batteries, so I wrote an article on self-service built-in battery switching with an apologetic “if you are interested” attitude.
However, I was surprised to see that some people actually self-serve.
