techdiff

No, I understand what you're saying. But they absolutely aren't doing that and there's no way they were eating the hardware cost as a loss-leader on future recurring revenue. The buyers paid for the hardware and then needed to pay for software to enable it.

I don't think either of those are consumer benefits at all. And the hardware was charged for when the car was initially sold - it was part of the total unit cost of creation. The subscription was a consumer hostile way of increasing spend with the brand. The genius' at BMW looked at Tesla's Plaid mode and FSD and thought they could replicate that model but failed to realise that people don't view their brands the same way - people treat a Tesla like a software purchase, but a BMW like an expensive toaster.

This is up there with BMW charging a subscription for heated seats.

Good question! And something I should explain better. This iteration of it uses the HQ location to generate the sending number. So if you're admin sets up within England, we grab a +44 number to send from. Irelands +353 code should be able to receive a message with some limits on Meteor Ireland network.

If you wanted to test it from Ireland, let me know and we will add support for it.

On the roadmap, we have a task to base the number on the end-user location (based on the dialling code of their phone number), which will also allow us to vary the sending times based on their location. Currently, the survey will deliver based on the HQ location time.

Not that I've found. If you have time, let me know what you're thinking and happy to see if we can help.

Thank you! We tested several ways of sending but the highest response rates and the most candid data came back via SMS.

On response rates, it's around 20% more responses via SMS than email or chat apps. This is the same for marketing delivered via SMS - the percentage is lower but compared to email, etc. it's relatively high.

In terms of the data quality - we think it's because SMS is not a "company owned" platform that could keep logs, etc. Maybe it feels safer for the end user so they're more honest.

Also, the interaction is fast and fun. We get responses initially via emoji and within the text comment you can hashtag and mention other staff. We're working on MMS support so people can send photos too. It's not globally supported but it works in the US at the moment.

Agreed. Thanks for this one! Will look into it.

There's so many troubles with org structures and models of operation. My day job is in this area, in an industry that is criminally inefficient. Any field that sells hours isn't incentivised to be quick about anything.

Signals can have an impact if it's run executive level to all staff. It gives people a voice who can see inefficiency but don't have a forum to talk about it, and move past layers that are trying to preserve their roles / status.

I will take a look at OfficeVibe for sure. How frequently do they send it out?

While many managers won't do it, usually it's an innocuous thing like being able to move employees between teams and see where data moves that give things away. Not saying that's what's happening in OfficeVibe at all, but it's a common fault.

Writing styles and people exposing themselves is definitely an issue. One commenter here had a great idea on rephrasing through ChatGPT or similar to mitigate that issue.

Good info, thank you! We were pushing on WhatsApp for South America and Asia (we tested through Singapore, Philippines, Myanmar, Indonesia and Malaysia but pulled back on the region because SMS carrier support is so varied. New Zealand is a nightmare too. But being well used in EU, we might need to bump this up the roadmap.

This is a super interesting idea. It might muddle things like sarcasm, in-jokes (we see a lot of those around Christmas party time) and things like that. But even if it was something the user could control perhaps, it might be a great addition.

I get what you're saying for sure, but I think there's a level below that where you need to deliver some bad news into middle management about what's happening and it can be "career limiting" to say it, so people avoid the issue. Hopefully they gain a level of safety to deliver that message through us.

This was the failure of the first version of the build years ago. We had positive and negative links sent via SMS in that one, which took you to a page where you could add a comment - anyone with some level of dev knowledge worried about hitting the links and certainly about commenting on the page.

The decision for us to house the whole interaction within SMS was also a response to links in SMS getting much sketchier to click. Emoji responses are more expensive to run, but they're smoother to work with and more useful for team feedback.