In the example given, it was only used a couple times in as many years... And their answer was to kill it and wait for someone to complain.
For something that's used a little more, I would say survey the customers who use it and find out why and how they use it. Maybe they use it because they actually want something else, but it's the best they could find. Maybe they use it by mistake, thinking it does something else. Maybe it's actually quite useful, and nobody knows it exists!
If none of your customers uses it for what you think is a good reason, I'd push hard to get rid of it.
At a previous company, every few months someone would write up a bug report saying feature X didn't work. (Different each time, of course.) After investigation, it would turn out 1 of 2 ways every time:
1) The feature works just as intended, but is so seldom used that the CSRs didn't understand how it works, and neither did the customer.
2) The feature has never worked properly, and nobody had tried to use it before.
The time spent dealing with those 2 situations cost the companies about 10 hours of my time every couple months. I have no idea how much CSR time it cost, but it was probably quite a bit more than my time. They didn't bring any customers in, and they didn't keep any existing customers. The features only ever cost money.
Comments
In the example given, it was only used a couple times in as many years... And their answer was to kill it and wait for someone to complain.
For something that's used a little more, I would say survey the customers who use it and find out why and how they use it. Maybe they use it because they actually want something else, but it's the best they could find. Maybe they use it by mistake, thinking it does something else. Maybe it's actually quite useful, and nobody knows it exists!
If none of your customers uses it for what you think is a good reason, I'd push hard to get rid of it.
At a previous company, every few months someone would write up a bug report saying feature X didn't work. (Different each time, of course.) After investigation, it would turn out 1 of 2 ways every time:
1) The feature works just as intended, but is so seldom used that the CSRs didn't understand how it works, and neither did the customer.
2) The feature has never worked properly, and nobody had tried to use it before.
The time spent dealing with those 2 situations cost the companies about 10 hours of my time every couple months. I have no idea how much CSR time it cost, but it was probably quite a bit more than my time. They didn't bring any customers in, and they didn't keep any existing customers. The features only ever cost money.