How to Fix Products
Introduction
What's the best way to improve your product or service? Delivering a unit with high quality doesn't automatically improve your final product or service. Instead of simply delivering units, remote workers must always consider how to maximize business value.
Solving instances of a problem, rather than addressing the root-cause, can give a false impression of high-quality. In reality, this type of short-term "solution" only hides the underlying low-quality work.
By seeking out and eliminating root causes, you can fix the problem permanently. While solutions are many, they don't all share the same impact. Let's look at a specific example.
Insight: For a particular product, we receive 10 tickets per week where support agents must cancel an order, then ask the customer to create a new order. For example, the customer wants to change their address after the order has already been sent to the warehouse, but isn't able to due to a limitation of the product. This results in re-work, and maybe even a lost sale if the customer isn't happy, or is unable to comply.
Solution: You discovered a way to update the address by canceling the order, then re-adding it, without requiring an additional interface with 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).
Moving forward
So, you've discovered a solution, but how can you execute it?
When you execute a solution, it helps your customer, but not necessarily the rest of the team, unless you document and share it.
One way to document your solution is to create and publish a how-to article. Most companies have a centralized knowledge-base, where you can add your document.
This way, your solution is searchable (forever) by others who face a similar issue in the future. Your insights are now a permanent asset that adds value to your entire team.
While this solution is helpful, it is still not ideal because 1) a problem still exists, and 2) your customer is still required to open a ticket.
A better approach is to create the same how-to article, but publish it to a knowledge base (KB) that is searchable by your customer. This allows them to find and read your article and hopefully resolve their issue without opening a ticket.
This approach is useful in deflecting support tickets, however, there is still a problem affecting your customer. So, your work is not yet finished.
When escalating a ticket to a team that works on the product itself (e.g., maintenance team, feature-development team), collect your insights and solution ideas, and send those directly to that team.
Solutions that are implemented into the product itself have little chance of ever occurring again. Customers will be happier, your organization will be more effective, and you'll reduce your own workload in the process.
Stack-ranking solutions
Below, we've stack ranked solution-types from the most effective, to the least:
Fix the product: Prioritize a list of limitations, bugs, customer issues, etc. and report this to Business Unit, letting them decide which fixes they want. Include the following in your report: Ticket type, ticket quantity (per week), and a simplified explanation of the customer expectation, your proposed solution, and the potential impact of that solution
Deflect tickets: Create customer-facing knowledge-base articles that allow customers to resolve tickets on their own
Fix tickets cheaply: Create knowledge-base articles that allows Level 1 support resolution, without escalating the ticket
Fix tickets expensively: Create a knowledge-base article that allows Level 2 support resolutions, without escalating the ticket
Notice, we didn't include 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 numbers three and four above, you could implement an even better solution (e.g., 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, within a single day, rather than 20 touches, over the course of a week. Or more effective troubleshooting steps that take 15 minutes, rather than four hours. These types of solutions add more value to your customer by serving them better and faster.
It's 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.)
A tester might discover a solution for increasing the coverage of their tests. And an accountant may discover a better method for presenting reports to allow more accurate reconciliation by the Business Units.
Whatever the team or application, stack ranking provides valuable insights for continuous improvement.
Conclusion
Whatever your role, you should make it a habit to consider new and improved solutions to problems your customers are facing. By doing so, you continue to add value to your customers, to our enterprise, and to your own professional career.
Assessment
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