In tech companies we track all sorts of metrics and statistics, and in businesses built on recurring revenue, customer satisfaction and renewal rates garner a lot of attention. When we think about satisfaction, we focus on customer support where we talk about ‘tickets,’ which is the umbrella term for all sorts of customer inquiries. Tickets could be bugs or data problems or just ‘how-to’ inquiries, so we further classify tickets into priorities and responsibilities, and then we start tracking metrics to gauge how effective we are at responding and solving tickets.
Tickets that are the result of a coding error get the most attention. If a client is ‘dead in the water’ it becomes an all-hands effort to figure out the problem and get it fixed ASAP. These are tier-1 problems, and alarm bells go off across the company. Classification schemes vary from company to company, but we all have ways to divide the remaining tickets into successively less urgent categories. It is said that indigenous people in the north have many words to describe snow, but further south we just call it ‘snow.’ Ticket management is similar, and the practitioners on the front line have an array of words to describe tickets, while customers have a more limited vocabulary and just see a ticket as a problem.
From a metrics and reporting standpoint, the focus is on support items that result in code changes - actual bugs. These are the impactful tickets that can cause big shifts in customer satisfaction, and require personal attention, so it is fair that we focus on them. However, think about all of the minor support inquiries and tickets that routinely get addressed (or often ignored) without a lot of fanfare.
There are thousands of support inquiries that fall into the ‘minor’ category. They range all over the place from how-to questions, to minor confusions, to simple settings, etc. The sheer volume can be surprising. Kudos to support teams for handling so many inquiries, but think about the impact these items are having on customer satisfaction. No user wants to contact support. Whatever is causing them to contact support is something that is getting in the way of doing their job. At best it is an annoyance, or at worst a showstopper. The minor inquiries are like thousands of paper cuts. If a user encounters enough ‘paper cuts,’ they will move from being a promoter to a detractor, and customer satisfaction will drain away.
Paper cuts are not necessarily coding errors or bugs. They may be user interface issues where it is not obvious how to accomplish a task, or they may be documentation shortcomings or training issues. The product may work as it was designed, but not the way a user expects it to work, so they get confused or frustrated and they call support. Often, the inquiries are the result of user error. Whatever the cause, each inquiry is a paper cut and lowers satisfaction by some small amount.
We tend to focus on the big stuff - product bugs and data errors and the like, but once you get the big stuff under control, the paper cuts set the tone for customer perception and satisfaction. On an NPS scale, the difference between someone giving a 7 or 8 (neutral rating), versus a 9 or 10 (promoter rating) is mostly one of tone. “It's OK, not bad, gets the job done, but it has issues…” = neutral. “It's great, easy to use, does the job well…” = promoter. In an urban setting, there is a theory that fixing the broken windows and removing the graffiti enables a neighborhood to build pride, and results in a general reduction in crime. In the tech world, stepping back from a product that basically gets the job done, but has a lot of tickets and minor bugs is like looking at a blighted urban setting. Fixing the broken windows will build customer satisfaction, loyalty, and promoters.
Companies that want to create a culture that is obsessed with customer delight need to focus on eliminating paper cuts and fixing broken windows. Notice I used the term ‘customer delight,’ rather than ‘customer satisfaction.’ Satisfaction equates to neutral (NPS = 7 or 8), but delight signals a promoter (NPS = 9 or 10). We want promoters, and we want them to tell all of their friends and colleagues how great our company and our products are. We want to remove any hesitation or caveats from their message. The key to moving a customer from satisfied to delighted lies in the details of their interactions with the vendor. A necessary component to shift the tone of customer conversations into the language of promoters is to drive down the number of support inquiries, starting with the glaring coding errors, but do not overlook the impact the minor ones are having. Sweat the details.