How to fix products

Adding continuous value to our customer adds continuous value to our enterprise.

Introduction

While working on tickets in the factory, you should always be thinking about how better to solve customers' problems - how to add value. There are many different solutions, but not all of them have the same impact. Let's look at a specific example.

Insight, Solution, Impact: an example

Insight: For the product Symphony Commerce, we receive 10 tickets per week where ICs must cancel an order, then have to ask the customer to create a new order. For example, if the customer wants to change their address after their order has already been sent to the warehouse (due to a Symphony Commerce product limitation). This results in re-work for the customer, and we might even lose the sales if the customer isn't able to comply.

Solution: You found a way for ICs to update the address by, first, cancelling the order, then re-adding it, themselves, without requiring additional interface with, or work from the customer.

Impact: End-to-end ticket resolution time decreased from 3 days, to 2 hours. The risk of losing sales was almost completely eliminated (1 sale lost per 10 tickets during the past week, where customers decided not to create a new order after cancellation).

Moving forward

So, you've discovered a solution, but how can you execute it?

It's possible to execute the solution for only the ticket you are working on, currently. This would certainly help your customer, but the rest of the ICs in the Team Room (TR) may not benefit from your method, simply because you haven't shared it with them. Plus, when you move on from that particular team, your solution would disappear along with you.

One way to share your solution is to document it by creating and publishing a "how-to" article. Most companies have a central knowledge-base, to which you can add your document. That way, your solution is searchable (forever) by ICs facing similar issues in the future. Your insights are now a permanent asset which benefit your entire TR. However, this is not the ideal solution, because a problem still exists, and still requires your customer to open a ticket. A better way to move forward might be to create the same how-to article, but publish it to a knowledge base (KB) which is searchable by your customer. This way, they can find and read your article, and hopefully resolve their issue, themselves, without opening a ticket. While this approach deflects support tickets, there is still a problem affecting your customer. So, your work is not yet finished.

At the same time you're executing all of the above solutions, you can also enable your customer to work directly on the product. For this, you'll need the support of your manager, the Business Unit (BU), or the Vice President (VP) of the TR. It's important that you check in with TR owner, before approaching BUs (e.g. Support TR's have a specific process) and provide them with your insights. Based on their own priorities, the Business Unit, or Team Room VP, can choose which solutions to pursue.

Even still, the BU/TR-VP may not choose your fix because it is not in alignment with their own priorities. Your best course of action is to create a prioritized list of issues, bugs, and limitations, and provide this report to the BU/TR-VP. This allows them to easily assess and choose from your proposed solutions. By making the process easy to understand, and to execute, you increase the odds of your solution being accepted, and you ensure that your products are fixed.

Stack-ranking solutions

Here is a stack rank of solutions (first is the best):

1. Fix the product: Get a prioritized list of limitations/bugs/customer issues etc. and report this to BU/VP and let them decide on which fixes to have. Make sure you include the following info on your report: -Ticket type -Quantity of tickets per week -Simplified explanation -Customer expectation, proposed solution, and potential impact

2. Deflect the tickets: Create customer-facing KB articles which allow customers to solve tickets on their own

3. Fix the tickets in a cheap way: Create a KB article that allows Level 1 support to solve the ticket at their level, and without escalating

4. Fix the tickets in an expensive way: Create a KB article that allows Level 2 support to solve the ticket at their level without escalating

Note, we haven't included your undocumented solution in the stack rank. That's because an undocumented solution is not a permanent one. You should always document your solution in order to create a permanent asset.

For #3 and #4 above, you could implement an even better solution (i.e. a more effective KB article) that would decrease the end-to-end resolution time of the ticket. For example, a ticket resolution in just two touches, and in one day, rather than 20 touches, taking more than a week. Or, more effective troubleshooting steps which take 15 minutes, rather than four hours. All of these solutions add value to your customer by serving them better, and faster.

Its important for you to realize that this stack rank is not only for customer support agents. A developer might also discover a better solution to his customer's problem (for example, a bug fix.) Or, a tester may discover a solution for increasing the coverage of their tests. An accountant might also find a better method for presenting reports, which allows the Business Unit to reconcile work units more accurately.

Conclusion

Whenever you are working on a ticket, you should make it a habit to always consider new and improved solutions for the specific problems your customers face. By doing so, we continue to add value to our customers, and to our enterprise.