The loudest message

A woman in Sharjah sells children's sleepwear from her home, and by the end of the summer she has a few hundred messages from parents.

Ask her what customers think and she will tell you about delivery. One father wrote three furious paragraphs about a parcel that arrived a day late, and she still knows them almost by heart. Two other complaints came in during her first week, when everything felt fragile. Those are the messages she carries around.

Then she sits down one evening and goes through all of them, start to finish, sorting each one into a rough pile. Delivery turns out to be a small pile. The large one is about sizes. Parent after parent, politely and without drama, mentions that the pyjamas come up small and they had to exchange them. Nobody shouted about it, so it never stuck.

This is how most of us read feedback. The early message and the vivid message take up more room than they deserve. The patient, boring pattern sits underneath, unread, because going through hundreds of notes by hand is tiring and we would rather trust what we remember.

The new text tools that can read a long pile and sort it are good at exactly this. They are not wiser than she is. They are just more patient, and they are not still upset about the angry father.

There is a second benefit. When she shows her sister, who packs the orders, the sorted piles, they stop arguing about which problem matters. They are looking at the same page.

The loudest message is the easiest one to hear. It is rarely the one the business most needs to answer.