Yesterday, in my entry entitled Angry Customers Tell 3,000 Friends, I explained how I became involved in customer relations at Decade Software. Kevin and I had devised a plan to allow customers to more freely communicate with us and with each other through a new web site.
By increasing transparency, we would bolster a trusting environment where everyone freely helped everyone else become successful using our products.
Our past successes had told us that teamwork using cross-functional teams was the secret to meeting goals, so the first thing I did was form a new team. The Customer Communications Task Force was formed to get clients talking.
We scheduled meetings with customers and began demonstrating our ideas for the web site and our ideas for opening communication between customers—and they loved what we were doing!
The CCTF had picked up speed, and we were soaring to the finish line, and then we turned a corner—and we hit a brick wall.
We discovered quickly that launching a new web site is an action that steps on multiple toes, and in short order, I was accused of invading the territories of Marketing, Client Services, Graphic Design, and Administration.
They said, you're moving too fast. If you modernize our web tools, you'll have to change the look and feel of everything, and that will cost the company time and money—and that will cause customers to ask: why are you spending time and money on web sites, when you could be fixing the defect I reported?
I couldn't argue with that logic. Making customers happy is a goal we all share.
So, I gave up and turned my attention back to the Development Team and those defects everyone was so worried about.
To my knowledge, we were the first team of developers ever to adopt a no defect policy. Every 30 days, we plan the next 30 days of work, and we commit to closing every defect reported by our customers. We've been doing this for over a year.
Now, someone was challenging our logic, saying...
"You're fixing every defect reported, but how do you know if all existing defects have been found?"
Kevin responded by hiring three additional testers and an additional developer.
All along, Kevin and I had agreed that our new customer outreach could not succeed unless quality was top-notch, so I asked him to approve overtime to commit to defects as they are reported.
In other words, my team no longer commits to closing all defects every 30 days.
We now commit to closing all defects every day.
This is an accomplishment previously unheard of in the software industry, but my team makes it happen.
Last week, one of our support technicians reported...
"It is really nice when customers call with how-to questions. It has been a long time since someone called to report a defect, and even when they do, it's nice to say it will be fixed immediately."
This empowered the CCTF to return to our communications goals, and this time, with the full support of everyone in every department...
...that is, until I suggested changing the company logo.
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