I am an avid user of many web services which try to tune their service to your requirements. They try to pick your brains on what you like and try to match their offerings to it. Most of the time that works amazingly well. But there are times when I feel there would be possibilities to make it work better. By just adding a simple option for instance. Not being a person to shut up and wait for it, I want to make my opinion heard. And so I do. I try to find a way to deliver my feedback. The question is why so many services make it so unbelievably impossible to do so.

As an example, I enjoy last.fm. It plays the music I like. Well, mostly. Every once in a while an artist drifts in that I do not like. Regardless of the song they are playing. So I would like to remove the artist from my list of possibly liked music. The only option they give me is to mark the song, not the artist. Looking for a place to leave my feedback, I could only leave it at a public forum as number 300+. Not very encouraging. Not as bad as BMW though. After being approached for a test drive in BMW’s 1 series, I wanted to let them know I would be interested, just not through the local dealer. As I never feel I am being taken seriously there. However, they have absolutely no way in which you can leave any feedback through their site. You can call an 0800 number, but I was not really looking for a call centre, now was I?

In comparison I would like to praise the guys at Nimbuzz. After trying an older version of their client, I found I had a nice list of things that could be improved upon. So when I received an email from them asking me to become a Nimbuzz ambassador, I answered them with my list of requests. It stayed silent for a while and then I received a mail from Tobias telling me that they were taking all my requests seriously. That felt good. I had gone through the trouble to make suggestions and now they were going through the trouble of assessing whether my suggestions were valid. It felt like a job well done. Imagine my joy when I found that every single suggestion in the mail has been dealt with. Now that is customer service for you. Thanks Nimbuzz. You just put BMW to shame.