How I became customer of my previous employer

I have changed my job 6 months ago to adapt to changes in my private life. I am still big fan of previous employer. Recently I started to use their product/service that was in early stage when I was leaving. Well, I used their other product while being there, so being their customer should not be new for me, but that one was stable and I've been in while this one is still in beta and I see from outside. I did not participate in development of either of them.

As can be expected this new product has issues. Bugs, usability problems, unfinished features. I expected that and it is not the part of problem why I decided to write about that. I always send my bug reports and suggestions. They are usually answered soon. Problem is when the answer contains "I asked and it should work". So it was not tried after my report, it was just believed it (still) works - maybe because it takes less time to assume than check and they have a lot of other things to do. But how long does it take to check that RSS feed does not contain any content? 20 seconds or less I guess.

My point is that experience have brought me completely new perspective. Till now I was always at provider's side and now I got to other side. Seeing different steps taken than I hoped for as a customer/user opened my eyes. Issues are not bad, only that having no clue when and if they will be resolved feels annoying. The service is free, so I do not feel ripped off and I understand their priorities have to be on paid tasks, but still it feels annoying. My current employer has better approach to handle these situations: acknowledge and thank for bringing to attention, assess, apologize and say when it is is expected to be fixed (followed by fixing it, of course). Taking this path is not only helping to keep good relationships between vendor and customers, but in fact can be felt as rewarding to customers, because they can be proud they helped with product/service.

For me, it means that I am now aware of these problems and I hope I will remember them next time I'll be assigned a bug.