Every company has a customer that every support person knows. At one company, we had Walt, and he would reach out to us almost every day about a very specific part of the product that he used more than anyone, and that we hadn’t really developed into anything fully. It had started as a test product that we opened to a few customers, and he was one of them. He continued to use it far longer than we anticipated anyone would, and he loved it. But the thing that he loved wasn’t fully-baked, and so he emailed frequently about bugs or issues that only a super-user would have found…and we never fixed them.
We didn’t think about this at the time, of course. We would just see Walt email in, roll our eyes, and ask “Who wants it?” because we knew it would be yet another frustrated, disappointed email that never came to anything.
In our case, using root-cause-analysis, or the 5 WHYS Approach could have helped us get to the bottom of the situation more rapidly. It would have eased Walt’s frustration, and saved the support team numbers of hours talking to Walt on the phone, via email, and sometimes through chat. Going through this root-cause-analysis with a customer probably takes around 15 minutes or so, if done via phone.
So, for Walt it might have looked something like this:
There is the root cause. We, as a company, build this part of the product as a hackathon with the intention to never build it out fully. In order to get Walt to stop emailing so frequently, we needed to set those expectations for him clearly. This would create a better experience for him, as he’d have a more upfront view of what to expect (though there would likely be some pain to start), and a better experience for us as we’d be receiving fewer emails.