After refreshing several widgets, I /finally/ got most of the displays to reload data properly after yesterday's latest incidents.
I'm still left with uncertainties about a lot of the displays.
For example, with "steps" when I woke up, it said I'd gone 231 steps (from last night after midnight) for 0.1 miles. Yet it tells me that this is 941 calories?!!!! Obviously I didn't burn 941 calories in walking 0.1 miles. So what the heck does that number mean? I've checked the help, searched the web.. I can find no documentation.
Similarly the "Calories Remaining" report. It did, eventually, get itself updated - after several reloads and resyncs- with yesterday's data. But it's now showing (a coincidence?) 941 calories remaining. Yet this number isn't right. Calories in/out report shows 1395, which is correct. So what does the value displayed on the bar graph for "Calories Remaining" mean?
Etc.
Why aren't these values, and their meaning and how they're calculated, defined anywhere?
At the very least, the 'description' of each widget in the side bar needs to be expanded with this information. One person could do that in an afternoon. Even better would be to add 'help' buttons to each widget to bring up that same pane of information in a floating pop-up. That could be coded in under a day.
That would be /very/ wise use of employees' time, as in about 8-10 hours you could eliminate a fair number of these blog questions and make the webpage feel less clunky and confusing.
There were a lot of complaints yesterday with GC being down.
While some of those reactions were on the 'aggressive' side, I don't think they can be entirely dismissed as 'entitlement mentality'.
The 'entitlement' mentality refers to expecting something for nothing, 'just because'.
That's not the case when you _pay_ for a service. Garmin products are not cheap, and when you buy them, you aren't getting just the hardware, but the support through the webpage and apps that actually let you view and use the collected data. That's something you _pay_ for.
And it's part of the advertising campaign - it's part of what is offered.
So it is perfectly legitimate for customers to feel as if they aren't getting the promised services, aren't getting their money's worth, when GC is consistently buggy or offline.
Because they /aren't/ getting what they paid for.
And Garmin can expect that such customer dissatisfaction will show up in reviews and reports on Amazon and elsewhere and will affect their future sales.
So I have to agree with those who suggest that Garmin really does need to start devoting more time and attention to maintaining, explaining, and improving the webpage and apps.
Because you're not 'done' when the customer buys the product ... not when the web/app portion is as much the product as the hardware is. Having great hardware but shabby/unreliable software means that half your product is unreliable.... and customers will react accordingly. Both here and in public media read by potential future customers.
Having better web interface and apps isn't just about product support and customer service .. it's also about marketing.
Because /everyone/ who uses a Garmin instrument will use one of those interfaces. Your entire customer base will give you "free PR" ... good or bad. Particularly in this day of internet reviews. And whether it is good or bad will depend, in great part, on their experience in using the web & app interfaces.
As part of this, the twitter account and status page /really/ needs to have status updates. Not just an uninformative 'down'. We know it's down .. that's why we're looking.
Instead there should be posts to say that a problem has been noticed, forwarded to the right department, is being looked at, and an estimated-time-to-fix if available. /Tell us/ if a machine has crashed, or a code has developed a bug, or the UPS delivery guy has spilled coffee into the server.
You'll get a lot /fewer/ angry customers if you give them some indication of what's going on and why, rather than just a little 'down' indication ... or even no indication at all as to whether or not a problem is being fixed.
If you don't want the 'general' twitter account to report every problem (and that could definitely be bad PR when things go awry a lot), create a new "Garmin-Support" twitter account just to give updates on such progress. The only people looking at that will be customers wondering when their problem is going to be fixed ... so that won't be negative PR of advertising the problems (we already know there are problems), but positive PR of telling customers that it's being investigated (which is good PR).
Of course the best PR would be for things to work right from the get-go, especially a service which customers have paid for and reasonably expect to actually work ... but nothing works perfectly, and some problems here and there aren't unreasonable.
Up to a point.
-LP
