RE: We’re already working on your suggestions… and you’ll see them in the next several months

The eHarmony product team says,

Thanks again for another round of excellent suggestions to help us improve your eHarmony experience.

Our team is already hard at work on several of the ideas that were [suggested]. We’ll be testing them over the next several months as the development is completed, so stay tuned…

That’s because those ideas happen to be (a) among the top reasons members have requested refunds in the past two years, according to Customer Care exit surveys, (b) among those cherry-picked and approved last year by the eHarmony Board of Directors, who are all Venture Capitalists and Investment titans and who all haven’t used eHarmony as customers ever and (c) what their programmers have been told to start on at least six months ago.

They’re saying the ideas are on the “testing stage” means that several Quality Assurance Engineers who haven’t used eHarmony as customers ever either are testing them on brand-new computers running only the two popular browsers (uh, out of five, and no, no mobile devices). QA takes 2 to 6 months, because hey their programmers haven’t used eHarmony as customers either, and sometimes the tests accidentally affect the site’s live data and mess up the production site (I’ll be darned to know why the dev systems and live systems aren’t separate), so you sometimes see phantom matches and matches you cannot close.

In case it isn’t obvious, not one of the above people ever tried closing forty matches, nudging thirty matches, answering twenty “same-old” essay questions, sending ten MH/CS lists, getting timeouts, etc. See the incongruity here?

Found a bug? Does the bug affect only 1% of users or only 1% of the time? That makes that bug EXTREMELY LOW priority, because, what, 1% of their users quit the site EVERY DAY anyway. (Total customer turnover is four months and one day is 1% of four months.) Come back after five years and the bug will still be there.

eHarmony often publishes stories from Customer Care Representatives regarding how happy and fulfilled they are to work in eHarmony. Ever wonder why there are never stories from their programmers, engineers and developers? I have an answer: Because once you see the site’s internals you will never recommend the service to anyone.

Note: This post is made up… er, mostly made up.