"Quick Update" & The Value of Boring CX
I’ve been sending a lot of emails lately that looks like this:
Quick update on the issue you reported last week: our engineers found the root cause and have a fix coded up. Assuming it passes code review and testing, it should ship next week. I’ll be back in touch once it ships.
It takes all of 2 minutes to check the status and get the email sent out, but customers really appreciate it. Here are quotes from recent Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey responses:
“Clear communication with periodic updates to keep me informed on the status of my issue”
“Appreciate the follow up and follow through!”
“Excellent job of communicating and providing relevant, contextual information.”
While these quick updates are easy to execute now, it actually took us a while to get to where we could reliably send these out on a consistent basis. Lots of different activities had to come together to produce this outcome. We—and our customers—are better for it, but how did we get there?
Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash
"The Easy Tickets"
There’s this fallacy I’ve seen at tech companies that a large percentage of the issues that are sitting in the inbox are “easy” and that you can come up with a creative solution to resolve those tickets on the cheap: hiring interns, outsourcing to an offshore BPO, finding the latest AI/ML tool to “deflect” those tickets, etc. “We’ll get someone/something to take care of the easy tickets and then we’ll work on the hard ones”, the thinking goes.
I don’t really have a problem with strategies that improve service and lower cost¹, but what gets me is 1) how often we overlook the positive side effects that come with easy interactions and 2) how frequently we overestimate their cost. To the latter point, how expensive is it, really, to take care of the easy questions in the inbox? If you get a 100 tickets per day and 80 of them are “easy”, my guess is that your team is churning through those in about an hour. It’s just not that expensive, so when I see vendors and CX leaders get “creative” about lowering cost to cut down on easy interactions, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. The cost savings are marginal compared to what you’re potentially giving up in terms of the experience to the customer².
Part of the problem is that we often equate “easy” with “boring”, and who wants to do boring work? But boring work is often greatly appreciated by customers. Reliably meeting expectations at all touch points in the customer journey is pretty darn hard to achieve and is greatly appreciated by customers, even if the tasks themselves may at times be boring.
Anyway, if easy tickets are less expensive than we think, I suspect the converse is also true: there are low-cost (perhaps even boring) activities that we’re overlooking that can go a long way to deliver a better customer experience. We should spend time thinking about what those easy and boring activities are and outline steps to get there.
Five Whys to Better Customer Experience
I began this article talking about the two-minute task of keeping a customer informed about a fix for an issue they’re having. It’s an easy (and mostly boring) task now, but eight months ago it was much harder to execute. And I think if I had gone into a meeting suggesting “we’re going to offer a better CX if we just email people every week about the status of their bug fix,” I would have gotten some raised eyebrows. It wasn’t immediately obvious what needed to change to arrive at an outcome where we could reliably deliver an improved customer experience at relatively low cost.
The truth is, some of our worst CSAT comments were because we failed to keep customers up to date about ongoing issues. We’d wait three weeks or more between updates, hobbling towards a resolution. This made us appear like we were dragging our feet relative to our customers’ expectations. How would we dig our way out?
There’s a concept that is (or used to be) popular in engineering circles called “Five Whys”. Basically, you take a problem and keep asking why until you get to the root cause. You can apply it to customer experience issues.
Why are we seeing negative CSAT comments about not receiving updates on ongoing issues? Because weekly updates wouldn’t be meaningful.
Why? Because engineering hasn’t made any progress.
Why? Because they don’t know what issues should be prioritized so they’re working on the wrong things.
Why? Because nobody is communicating what should be prioritized in the backlog.
Why?
Etc.
After going through this exercise, we get a sense that if we want to receive better CSAT comments in response to keeping customers up to date about ongoing issues, we need to do a better job at communicating priorities to engineering. Now, this seems easy on the surface, but there’s quite a bit of work involved with aligning activities to achieve this outcome.
Re-aligning activities
Recall Michael Porter’s definition of strategy from an earlier newsletter:
“Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value.”
When we talk about “what needs to happen to be able to keep customers up to date on ongoing issues”, what we’re talking about is strategy: Not a lot of companies take the time to provide meaningful periodic updates, so what set of coordinated activities (tasks we’re not currently doing) is going to allow us to deliver an improved customer experience (periodic updates) at a lower cost (two minutes)?
We started by setting up a weekly meeting between support engineers and product engineers to talk about the top customer issues. This addresses the “because nobody is communicating what should be prioritized in the backlog” problem.
We were hesitant to start with a meeting (I’m going to opine that it’s because meetings are boring) and the first meetings were clunky. They often ran over their allotted thirty minutes and we consistently felt we weren’t getting through everything we needed to. But as we got better at meetings, we noticed we were able to move much more quickly through the agenda, and better yet, engineering was increasingly focused on customer-facing issues. We now get through our list of customer issues in about fifteen minutes, in part because we’re more efficient with our time, but also because our engineers are more in tune with the issues facing customers, so they tend to resolve them more quickly as they arise.
Another activity we had to get better at was leaving comments on Clubhouse cards (Clubhouse is our bug tracker). This is another one of those low-cost “boring” tasks that has incredibly high value. By working with support and engineering to provide more detailed information in the comments, we were in a much better position to provide meaningful updates to customers.
Between the improved meetings and detailed comments, we now had the pieces in place to be able to provide periodic updates to customers in less than two minutes.
Does it require a bit of effort to realign activities to achieve a strategic outcome? Of course. Part of the challenge is choosing the strategic outcome. Don’t dismiss strategies just because they seem “easy” or “boring”. If a strategy is beneficial to customers, embrace it. Then think backward on what it will take to get there.
Etc.
Footnotes:
For sure, there are tools out there that will improve the experience for customers while e.g. reducing the number of support tickets, but you have to make sure you account for the “improve the experience for customers” bit. I’ve seen plenty of tools that promise ticket deflection (lower support volume) with a questionable benefit to customer experience. Some tools are better than others, but there are no silver bullets.
There are of course times you’ve got too much of a particular issue in your inbox because your product is confusing, has bugs, etc. In these instances the best way to improve customer experience is usually “improve the product”, not deflect them so you don’t hear about the pain in the inbox.