Assumptions, coda
And a dryer update, not that you asked for it
After last week’s post on assumptions, a friend of mine sent along this comment:
It's missing customer assumptions. Customers can drive you to focus on other things because they're demanding or just know that they're right, etc. … Sometimes we're pulled into a rabbit hole because of them.
She was absolutely right: not all of the assumptions that cause us problems, on support teams and elsewhere, are coming from inside the house. Sometimes it’s the squeaky wheel syndrome, sometimes it’s a suspicion that someone else knows more than you do, sometimes it’s panic that you might lose a customer if you don’t address their concerns, the way they want them addressed, right now. No matter the cause, getting pulled into a customer-dug rabbit hole is never a good way to ensure long-term customer happiness.
Keeping customers happy even if they’re wrong
When a support issue has been dragging on, or if the customer is impatient, they may start throwing out their own proposed solutions. Some of them are clearly outside the scope of support, such as nontechnical solutions like ‘buy third-party product X for us to cover this use case’, but more often they’ll have particular technical ideas they want to try.
Now, I don’t want to suggest that you shouldn’t give these solutions due consideration. Sometimes these ideas are, in fact, good ones that you may have overlooked. The customer does generally know their own environment best, after all. But what you want to avoid is entertaining clearly impractical or impossible solutions just to keep the customer mollified.
Maybe the customer does know best?
One thing I’ve observed among strong support engineers is something common across high performers: they are sometimes less confident in their own proposed solutions, because they know how complex the problem space is. Think of it as the flipside of the Dunning-Kruger effect—instead of overvaluing their own limited expertise, they undervalue their high expertise by believing others must be at least as competent. That leads even strong performers to sometimes fall into the trap of assuming that a customer-proposed solution, even a seemingly incorrect one, should be explored fully. Hey, maybe they do know better!
And sometimes they do. But as I mentioned above, that doesn’t mean we should explore these solutions past the point at which they’re clearly wrong or counterproductive.
But what if we lose the customer over this?
It’s a valid concern. Especially in situations of high customer frustration, there can be a strong push to do something, anything, to show that we value the customer and their business and want to keep them both. This is often the right move, and I don’t mean to say that support should just wash its hands of difficult customers, but it also makes it easy to uncritically fall into the ‘just investigate what the customer wants to investigate’ hole.
So how do I keep from falling for this
When dealing with a troublesome support issue and a customer losing patience, it’s easy to cast about for anything that may help, including going down technical paths that really don’t make sense. But we have to push back against that feeling and always keep long-term customer satisfaction at the front of mind. If you’re having networking problems in a customer environment, the correct answer probably isn’t ‘wipe the system and start over’. And if that’s what the customer is insisting on, it’s your job to recognize that this is the wrong course of action and be prepared to explain why.
Whenever we’re asked explicitly by the customer to do specific things, it’s important not to let that short-circuit the established support process. Take in the request, place it into the proper context, and evaluate it on its own merits. If it makes sense, great! They just helped you out. But if they’re asking for nonsensical or clearly counterproductive things, it’s time to push back. The good news is, you’re probably not on your own in pushing back. With the help of customer success, craft an appropriate response that:
Acknowledges customer frustration
Thanks them for their active participation in the troubleshooting process
Explains (to an appropriate level of detail) why you’re not following their suggested course of action
Explains your next steps and reasoning behind them
Going back to my broken dryer, because it really is the metaphor that keeps on giving, the dryer repair guy quoted me $550 to fix it. I asked him if it made sense for me to just buy a new one and he agreed immediately. But what if I hadn’t asked? He’d happily let me spend the money to fix a dryer that will probably just break down again in a few months. The customer is always right, after all. But I sure wouldn’t have been happy with myself, or with him, when it did break again. You need to do better with your own customers and try to steer them away from acting against their own best interest, even if it’s profitable for you in the short term.
Thanks for reading Andy's Support Notes 💻💥📝!