Angry customers tell 3,000 friends

A teammate said to me yesterday—referring to my entry entitled It's the Customer's, Stupid!...

"That's not really your job is it? I mean, you're a software development manager. There's a whole department working with customers. Don't you have more important things to do?"

Of course, I responded as you might expect...

"Taking care of the customers is everyone's job."

And then, I told the real story.

Last Fall, Kevin came to me and said...

"It seems like your team is really self-managed now. You still have to turn the flywheel occasionally, but generally your team can tackle anything you throw at them..."

Since Kevin is my manager, I had a suspicion as to where this was going.

"...So, I'm thinking that maybe you have some bandwidth you're not using, and I could use your help with some things. I would like you to take over as Conference Coordinator for our annual training conference."

Kevin knows I love event planning, and he knew I would dive in head first.

I worked for months assisting cross-functional teams from all departments. My goal was for them to present as never before. I wanted customers to learn more than ever before, but I also wanted them to enjoy the event more than any conference prior.

And—to some extent—we met the goal. The teams shined, and customers did say repeatedly that the 2008 Decade Training Conference was the best ever.

However, I wasn't all that satisfied.

We can easily teach customers how to use the software. It is intuitive and versatile enough to meet any need, and when it's not, we make it so, but how a customer needs to use the software is different from customer to customer and situation to situation. Those things you only learn in the real world—not in a conference class or a software testing lab.

In class after class, customers would ask questions that only other customers could answer. We thought that our staff knew our industry, but we were fooling ourselves.

No one knows our customers business better than our customers.

I left the conference asking myself...

"What can we do to help customers more easily help each other?"

Shortly after the conference was over, Kevin was back in my office. We were discussing another problem related to the conference. I wanted a way to make it easier to plan next year's conference. I wanted customers to be able to more easily register and provide information on how to make the conference better for them.

Kevin said...

"So you're thinking of creating a web site just for the conference?"

I said...

"Uh, hmm, uh... Yes, Kevin, that was exactly the idea that I had."

Of course, we both knew that was not the case. It was just Kevin's way of suggesting solutions without telling me exactly what to do, but it truly was a great idea!

I went forth and prospered, but...

....the more I worked on the site, the sooner I realized...

...how extremely easy it would be to allow customers to help themselves.

We increase the transparency. We give them better tools to freely communicate with each other year round!

I picked up a book—as I always do when I need to learn something fast. It was called Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000, and reading it, I was off to the races.

That, of course, was when all hell broke loose.