Our paychecks primarily come from customers, directly or indirectly. That may point to there being no negatives in dealing with them. Nevertheless, supporting users can be a struggle. Developers and engineers do not typically enjoy support and interaction with them. That does not keep us from finding a positive customer experience in the work we are asked to do.
Setting The Stage
I have often pointed out that those “pesky customers” slow down our development progress. It is not uncommon to be in a situation where the new features or improved performance we are chasing would be available sooner if we could “pause” our customers for a while. Even maintenance windows would be more convenient if our customers did not use the product so much. These statements have a healthy amount of sarcasm. However, working with customers can be a challenge.
Stepping Into A Gold Mine
Engineers are not known for their love of customer interactions. However, those interactions are some of the most valuable things we can do for our products or company. A “cold call” is the most challenging sales situation. When we have any interaction with a customer, we not only do not have that situation, we can build a relationship to make the next sales call warm or even hot. People buy from those they trust, know, and like. When we help customers and get them to like our company and us, they are more likely to spend more money. This is a situation that is almost literally worth its weight in gold.
A New Set Of Eyes
Customer interactions are frustrating because they use our products in ways we never considered. However, this is a positive customer experience that can lead to new features and even new products. They provide us another set of eyes for our solution and direct feedback about what we have created. Look at the focus on customer reviews in recent years. While our interactions are not going to be public, they do still provide a wealth of data and information.
Did We Solve The Problem?
We build products to solve problems. Sometimes we miss the mark. The good and bad news is that these situations let us know how we did. That makes any interaction a positive customer experience. We can learn from our mistakes, find new problems to solve, and sometimes we even get a pat on the back.
Episode Challenge: How did your last interaction go? Was it a positive customer experience?
