Customer Engagement and Product Development Progress
I feel it is time to start a clear thread that pulls together the common themes of so many posts on this forum, in the hope that there is someone in Tado that actually understands the appalling disrespect that the company has shown their customer base over at least the last 18 months but almost certainly longer. Creating a community forum and then to all intents and purposes utterly ignoring that community leaves customers feeling as though they have wasted their money and looking for alternatives. It will create a negative image of the product in the market when that inevitably leaks out to potential customers.
I mean no disrespect here to @Jurian or @Rob who seem to have absolutely no engagement or support from their management. On the contrary, I hope that they can use this thread to find someone inside their organisation to take this more seriously and engage to reap the clear benefits of many of the discussion threads running on this forum.
This forum is full of customers looking to offer up insight in to the way in which they use the product, areas where it can be improved, features that they feel would make it more useful to them and to others. We are dismissed as power users and corner cases, but our better understanding of our needs and willingness to spend our time providing this kind of feedback is no different to the initial internal product features and design discussions in startups, except that they lack the arrogant "this what they can have" because they are moderated by a much wider audience and more opinions. They are, in fact a realtime evolving analysis and response of what happens when the "plan" is tested in real battle. Commanders that read the battle, adapt the plan and evolve are the winners, the losers are the ones that steadfastly stick to the plan even when it is clearly lacking or failing.
We have been told for months that Tado developers have been working on some of our suggestions and requests, and that there are other useful new features under development. I am going to call "Bullsh*t" on this today based on the following (version history for the IOS App):
Between approx July and October, there were 14 app updates to the IOS apps, each and every one providing "Various UI, stability and performance improvements." No new features, not a single detail of how they have improved the product. Frankly, this sounds very much like developers "turd polishing" - fiddling with something that works to fix invisible "issues" that nobody has noticed and have little or no real impact.
In October, the long awaited and often requested (NOT!) "Energy IQ" feature was released as app version 7.0 - I am sure that their are people lining the streets and cheering.
A month or so later, app version 7.1 finally brought us the all important "Dark Mode", and some more "Various UI, stability and performance improvements." which I am sure was well worth the wait.
Since then, a further 9 app updates all providing important "Various UI, stability and performance improvements."
It feels as though in 6 months Tado have provided exactly zero useful progress to their customers and focussed on features that nobody cares about, whilst allowing a team of rogue app developers to sit in a corner and do whatever they want (or spend 6 months fixing their own buggy code).
About a year ago, @Jurian and @Rob announced a "new" initiative to re-vamp the forums, to re-engage with this community and to engage with their customers more actively. I believe there were even some direct consultations with community members. All of that has resulted in zero change as far as I can see. We still see lame comments about different markets, other focus and features that have been absolutely absent.
I would like to invite Tado to open a dialogue with this community that does more than just pay lip service to customer engagement and feedback. To step outside of their ivory towers and echo chambers and to hear and to see what their customers really want from a leading product in this marketplace and perhaps to understand how to use this kind of crowdsourced feedback to truly move into a market-leading position. I am personally willing to take time to speak to anyone in Tado about how to change this ridiculous situation.
Finally, before anyone from Tado posts to tell me that the UK is a small market, that it's unique and difficult compared to other markets and we should think ourselves lucky that anyone bothers with us at all, I will point out that at least half of the most discussed topics on this forum have little or nothing to do with market-specific functionality. A significant driver for consumers today is the ability to reduce their energy costs, to reduce their personal impact on planet resources and to simplify the complexity and demands made on their personal time when adopting products that are supposed to make life "better". I also personally use Tado in four different properties in different locations across UK and Europe and I can tell you clearly that the biggest problems are NOT my personal UK boiler, they are the same in each and every location.
I look forward to comments from my fellow community members and most importantly someone within Tado with some kind of backing to have an adult conversation (again, no slight on either @Jurian or @Rob).
XKRMonkey
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Good post @XKRMonkey I agree with everything you say, and am personally amazed that I and others could be here FT supporting users who are stuck in installation and have no CH/HW but are getting no input from Tado whatsoever.
Appalling.
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Sounds like a triumph of hope over experience.
Why should Tado suddenly care? They’ve build their company up to be worth a few hundred million. Aren’t they being bought? Sounds like a success.
In terms of the U.K., they gave us the EU wireless controller back, they got the PR guy on Heatgeek, what more should we expect?
The forum is here for the community to self help. That bit works ok for them. People kindly work for free and sort problems. Saves them paying people to do it.
Who is in the market leading position, if not Tado?
I do think they are arrogant and have been hugely indifferent towards the U.K. customers, just to be clear. But I struggle to see anything driving them to change.
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This post reminded me that in January 2021 I had written the following on my twitter account: "back when I bought @tado 1.5 years ago support replied within an hour, if not much sooner. nowadays it's normally within a day. coupled with little features development, feels as if they have closed up shop".
Evidently I was wrong on that last statement. And I'd use somewhat less harsh words than you, but overall well articulated. Honestly I don't see Tado opening a dialogue or anything. Somehow the product seems to sell, the company seems to be successful and most of us are kind enough to vent off in this forum, which most prospective buyers won't read to begin with, rather than on twitter, facebook, blogs, Amazon reviews etc. I wish them well, but I doubt that we'll see any real innovation any time soon.0 -
Agree that the opening post was very well argued and spot on and unfortunately I also agree with the following posters that 'they' (if they read it) will issue out their Mk IV Ears (Blocked Versions) again and carry on as normal. Come on tado - surprise us all, for once, please!
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Same feelings here. I have had Tado for years but the last couple of years seems like they've lost their way altogether.
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@XKRMonkey What a good post and I'm in agreement with your comments.
I have a couple of extra thoughts:
1) Maybe Tado are focusing development on new generation hardware and what we have no will become obsolete and just receive bug fixes (hence the lack of any useful updates)?
2) My "outside in" view is that Customer Service, Product and Development teams in Tado are not aligned and I don't think the left hand knows (or maybe even cares) what the right hand is doing
3) My guess is the multitude of updates are obscure bug fixes and code enhancements the success of which are probably monitored through the TestFlight user base (although to your point we can't help with testing when we don't know what's changed) log gathering
I am a fan of the technology, but as a company Tado appears so completely disconnected (almost arrogant?) from its users. I've worked in small, medium and large org's and I've seen the bleeding and downstream issues this level of disconnect will eventually cause the company. I can also take an educated guess what is driving this and perhaps some changes are needed.
We're not enemies, we are (engaged) customers ☺️
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Thanks for your comments, I have a couple of counterpoints.
Theoretically and simplistically, this kind of system should fall into 3 (maybe 4) parts.
The Application Engine - this is the smarts of the system, where the bulk of the features happen. It's the database of elements (real time data from devices like thermostats and geo-location, static data such programme schedules and outcomes/states for devices such as valves or demand switches), plus the application engine that processes that data, considering the real-time elements, comparing current state against schedule and other features, and updating state data for the active components to turn valves and boiler on and off.
The User Interface - the Smartphone App or WebUI that allows the user (owner) to see status, update configurations for schedule and other settings and generally interact with the Application Engine. You might argue that the developers of the App are a different team to those developing the WebUI (two separate teams, rather than a single combined team), but many apps are really just smart browsers rendering the WebUI data with different "skin" to make things fit on a different resolution/format screen, and are really a single team.
The Physical Hardware - The SRVs, thermostats, bridges and receivers that make up the physical system in the user's house. These are of limited consequence to the application since from the system perspective they either work or they don't. A new version of any element of the hardware (for example the recent introduction of basic SRVs) is largely transparent - they come on and they go off according to the behaviour of the application engine, based on the data collected by the whole hardware system. Temperatures read by SRVs or Wired or Wireless thermostats are still just temperatures. Whether the hardware can count in 1/10 degree or 1/2 degree only affects the accuracy of the system a little, not it's overall function.
What this means is that there are logically 3 different teams within the development department. The hardware/firmware team are a different group. Their skills are quite different to the app guys, and whatever they are doing to the hardware makes no difference to the other 2 teams until it functions and can be manufactured and sold. Even then, the new basic SRV probably didn't take much effort from the AppEngine team or the AppUI team to integrate.
Let's consider a couple of common threads (Caveat - I know nothing about the Tado design or implementation, but I have been a professional software designer and developer and I understand the good and bad of software design):
Individual GeoLocation - this requires both the AppUI and AppEngine teams, but it shouldn't be complex or time-consuming to implement. The AppUI team are already providing Geolocation data into the database - they must be for even the feature as it stands today to work, and in fact they already know which device (person) is home or away because the app can already show you that. The only effort from the AppUI team is to add a method of tagging people to a specific room/zone. The AppEngine guys already have code that considers whether any known GeoUser is "HOME" from a global perspective, and there must also be a thread that is run to examine the current state of a given room/zone, based on temperature, open window triggers and schedule, adding a check to see whether any known GeoUsers of that room are "Home" should be a few moments effort (assuming a well-designed and documented codebase).
The inclusion of such a useful feature is a no-brainer, the data already exists in the system, creating a more granular map of users to rooms/zones and moving some decision making into the room/zone state evaluation process should be simple and quick to implement in a well-structured and well-designed software application.
2FA/MFA - this should be another simple change, and can easily be made a customer choice like many other sites and applications do. Google, Microsoft and several other organisations offer free MFA solutions using smartphone apps or SMS one time messages that can be simply deployed to replace or augment existing login mechanisms. Successful authentication usually leads to the issue of a token for subsequent operation requests, which is why replacing the authentication itself should not be problematic. There is no real sense in not prioritising such a straightforward, low-impact change, whether or not Tado believe that this is important, because customers do and increasingly customers are using criteria such as this in their purchasing considerations.
Other requests such as Multi-Home Support are harder to predict or extrapolate without understanding better the design of the system and how well the codebase is implemented and maintained. Even so, I would have expected that MFA and Multi-home are similar kinds of change (successful auth leads to an access token, access token is linked to property/account, users that have more than one property select the active token for the property that they wish to interact with, nothing much else needs to change).
This is why it's hard to understand what is going on inside Tado, and why they are so determined to keep customers in the dark about plans, focus and timelines. Many of the requests for features on these forums are good ideas that should honestly not be difficult to implement. Vague updates about other priorities does nothing to make customers feel valued.
Come on Tado, New Year, New You, New Engagement with your customer base!
XKRMonkey
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I just want the App to work or control my simple system from the website which is largely blocked to me
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Just to resurrect this post, I've been using Tado for a couple of years and this post thread being over a year old and nothing has changed.
I've recently been planning to add to my system to make my Ufh work using Tado and support just give me the answer "get a professional installer"
No list of installers and no help to find one.
I think they are pushing their installer reward scheme so much that they've failed to realise that the best way to get your product selling is word of mouth.
I've never had anyone say hey Tado is great. I've never suggested it and don't know any installers who fit it.0 -
I dont recommend tado to anyone now.
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I’m afraid I would only recommend Tado to people who are willing to troubleshoot it themselves. For people who just want a heating system to work it isn’t good enough.0
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Tado is first and foremost a heating product. It's been months now but they refuse to consider even simple requests like "comfortable temperature range". Not necessarily making it user-adjustable, something as simple as "we've lowered this by a couple of degrees, to accommodate rising heat costs", which would probably be good enough for most users.
I think we can safely rename this thread so that instead of "Progress" it reads "Dead".
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I've had tado installed for well over a year now, I'm overall happy with it, but there's been no new additions to the functionality of the app/system. With so many good suggestions on the forms, none have been implemented, seems like people are just wasting there time commenting with new ideas..........0
