Naughty America’s first foray into interactive VR porn shows the power of listening

The adage ‘the customer is always right’ is a bit of a crock, and yet there’s a grain of truth running through it that, if ignored, will always be bad for business. You should always take the opportunity to listen to your customers, even if you ultimately decide you disagree with what they’re saying.

Take, for example, Naughty America VR‘s recent launch of interactive scripts for some of its virtual reality videos — the kind that work with (in this case) TheHandy to provide an automatically synced experience, matching on-screen action with the movements of the toy. In itself, this isn’t really particularly novel or newsworthy though it’s a move definitely welcomed by Naughty America subscribers on Reddit.

Initially, however, the announcement got a bit of a mixed reception, summed up pretty nearly in this single post by Spacers1000.

“This is seriously incredible, I just mouthed ‘oh my lord’ when I saw this post. This is what members want to see, huge thank you. Edit – never mind, the scripts are not downloadable which NA just so you know, defeats the entire purpose. Your streaming is nowhere near good enough to provide a great user experience. I’m giving you a big ‘cmon man’.”

“Exactly on point ^ hell even the slr’s pay to download script model makes more sense and I hate that. It should just be included with your paid sub like Czech imo.. Honestly thinking more on it this makes none.. Naughty America I know I talk alot of crap usually, but its just because when you guys hit. You fregin hit it out of the park your bggg scenes are my all time favs but man you do silly things sometimes lol smh,” getsocial2014 wrote.

In fact, in that thread, removing Naughty America’s 13 responses leaves 44 other messages. In those, the word download or downloadable appears 21 times, so it was clearly a common opinion.

Rather than shrugging it off as some dissatisfied people on Reddit, the company re-considered its decision to not allow downloading of the interactive scripts, and then quickly changed its mind the following week.

Clearly that was a correct move. It turned an arbitrarily bad decision into an actively good one that allowed interaction with its core audience. Putting aside the pointless technical limitation (there are ways to automatically download scripts even if ‘not allowed’) that hindered the overall experience, it made Naughty America’s users (and prospective users) grateful.

It’s really this gratitude in the subsequent Reddit thread that struck me; that in a world where customers half-expect to be ignored by seemingly-faceless businesses, being listened to was the thing that was truly of value.

“Respect for changing your decisions on the downloading for scripts. Love that yall listened to customer feedback. A plus for me for being a year subscriber,” Pastaboy94 wrote.

G2Kbuffetboy said: “Now we are talking, NA! And major props to listen and react so quickly to customer feedback. Seriously, sometimes that makes all the difference! Will definitely give these downloaded scripts another try!”

Again, nearly 25 percent of the responses in the thread included this sentiment.

And how do we know they’re not just happy at being able to download interactive scripts, more than happy at being listened to? Well, of course they’re happy they got what they wanted, but there’s no need for them to actively say ‘thanks for listening’ built into capitalism.

But how do we really know that a little bit of listening can go a long way? Because the scripts released so far aren’t really very good quality. In fact, they seem below average, and far below those of some rival sites, like CzechVR and yet the users are still happy. They can believe the assurances that the quality of the first few demo scenes won’t be the final overall quality, because they were listened to before.

And if that quality doesn’t improve and new ones aren’t added? They can unsubscribe and vote with their wallet.

Until that potential eventuality, however, it’s a pretty rare day that we have an (almost) unreservedly positive article to write about a product, launch, or other piece of news, but incredibly Naughty America turned a floundered launch into a customer success story on this occasion.

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