The Proactivity Bit (Part 1) | Customers, Etc.
On how we can find ourselves in reactive relationships with customers.
In my last newsletter, I mentioned I’d be slowing down the pace of my writing but also exploring starting a new newsletter focused on more spiritual things.
The new newsletter is called Ora, Et Cetera and if you sign up today—it’s free—you’ll get the first post right in your inbox. Customers, Etc. is mostly about work. Ora, Et Cetera will cover various non-work things, but it will mostly be about prayer.
With that, here’s the Customers, Etc. post for this week.
It’s Monday morning and you’re afraid to open your email. One of your best enterprise customers, Zenithra Dynamics, has been on you for months about issues with your product. Despite everything you’ve done, you just can’t seem to make them happy. Every Monday it’s a new email about something wrong.
As you sit down at your computer, MacOS needs to restart to install an update. All your windows have been closed automatically except for this one utility that’s preventing the computer from restarting. You decide to pull out your journal and reflect on the situation with Zenithra.
What happened? And what can you do about it?
You had a decent amount of experience under your belt as a customer success manager when you got assigned Zenithra Dynamics. They were a dream customer. Their enthusiasm for the product was so intense, they practically onboarded themselves. You joined calls to cheer them on, but you hardly had to do any work.
The bi-weekly check-in calls were similarly easygoing and positive. You always started those meetings by walking through the standard set of success metrics that you shared with all customers to demonstrate how much value they’re receiving from your product. Zenithra was basically a team of power users, making the success metrics look like a home run. Although you left space for their team to ask questions, they usually preferred to just end the call early. Soon enough they asked if the calls could be moved to once per month.
A few months back, and about nine months into the relationship, you noticed the tone of the calls started to change. During the usual readout of the metrics, everyone was unusually silent. When you asked for questions, Jennifer piped up, “Hey, can you help us figure out what’s going on with one of our support tickets?” Jennifer was your champion and biggest advocate.
“Sure thing,” you replied as you opened up your ticketing system. You swallowed as you noticed multiple open tickets for Zenithra. “It looks like you have several tickets open—is there one in particular that’s causing you trouble?”
“It’s the one with the billing part of the app. We’ve been told it’s been escalated to engineering, but there hasn’t been any progress. We check in every week and the answer is always the same. ‘We’ll get to it when we get to it’ is what we’re hearing.”
You want to say that what they actually said was that the bug is progressing through the backlog, but you bite your tongue. “I’m really sorry about that. Would it be okay if I followed up with the support and engineering teams offline and get back to you?”
“That’d be okay,” Jennifer said, “and do you think we could move back to a bi-weekly call cadence?”
Although it took some time to connect with the support manager and figure out what was going on, your boss was able to talk to the head of engineering to get the bug fix prioritized, allowing you to email the team at Zenithra before the next meeting. With that out of the way, you expected the next call to run more smoothly.
As you started in on the metrics, Jennifer interrupted, “do you think we could jump straight to an issue we’re having? It’s the one with the data integration bug.”
“Yes, of course.” You tried to hide your anxiety as you pulled up the help desk queue and noticed four outstanding tickets for this customer, several of them a few weeks old. You found the data integration ticket, the call ending with your promise to track it down.
You look up from your journaling and realize you’re late to a coffee date with an old colleague.
You and Joseph had both worked on the support team back in the early days when the company was first founded. You moved into customer success while Joseph progressed within support engineering before eventually joining the site reliability engineering team a couple years back.
“How’s it going?”, Joseph piped up, sipping on his latte.
“To be honest, I’ve been better,” you respond.
“Oh yeah? You want to talk about it?”, he offers.
You decide to take him up on it, spending the next twenty minutes filling him in.
“The problem is,” you conclude, “every single bug is getting fixed, but that never seems like enough. And on top of that, all our success metrics look fine.”
Joseph thinks for a minute, and then a lightbulb goes off. “Do you remember when we learned about causal loop diagrams at that support conference years ago?”
“Vaguely,” you respond.
“Okay. You mentioned that the customer seems to be consistently upset, despite what you’re trying to do. Let’s see if we can find a reinforcing feedback loop that’s causing the customer to remain upset.” Joseph pulls out his iPad and starts to draw. “You said it started a few months ago when the customer started escalating issues, right?”
“Yes,” you agree, “but we always fixed them when we would escalate the issues.”
“That’s fine,” Joseph responds. “We’ll draw that in.”
“Do you remember what comes next?” Joseph prods. Seeing your blank face, Joseph continues, “we need to label the loop.”
“But that’s a balancing feedback loop!”, I shout. “I thought you said we were looking for a reinforcing feedback loop. And isn’t this a good thing? We’re fixing the bugs!”
“Fixing bugs is a good thing, and you’re right, we still need to find a reinforcing feedback loop that explains why the customer might be upset with what’s happening here. Do you think maybe it started with frustration around needing to escalate in the first place?”
“I suppose”, you reply, “but I still don’t see the reinforcing feedback loop.”
“You don’t see the reinforcing feedback loop yet because we haven’t drawn it,” Joseph grins. “This might surprise you. Take a look.”
“That has to be wrong,” you retort. “You’re saying our team’s bug fixes go in the same direction as ‘feeling of I have to escalate’, meaning that every time we fix a bug, it causes that negative feeling to increase. That can’t be right.”
“It is right,” Joseph shoots back, “and it’s also where we find our reinforcing feedback loop! It seems counterintuitive—you would expect bug fixes to be a good thing, right?—but every time your team fixes a bug in responses to an escalation, it only confirms the feeling that your customer has to escalate in order to get anything done. “You’re in pure reactive mode, my friend.” You watch as Joseph draws the word REACTIVE on top in all caps to make his point.
“Okay, so how do I get out of this bind?”, I beg.
“I’m out of time for today—can you meet at the same time next week?”, Joseph asks.
“You’re killing me. Yes of course, but what do I do about Zenithra?”
“We’ll explore a more comprehensive solution next week,” Joseph responds, “but for now, see if you can get the engineering team to prioritize one additional bug in addition to the one the customer escalated.”
“Which one?”, you clarify.
“Just pick one. And tell me if anything changes on your next call.”