February 26, 2024

Handling sensitive topics: customer frustration

To be fair, they usually have a point

Last week we discussed handling sensitive support issues, specifically when they involved security-related concerns or vulnerability reports. This week we’ll continue along the same lines for another major category of sensitive issues: what do you do when the customer is angry? Maybe it’s something you did, maybe it’s not, but if you don’t handle it promptly, you’re at risk of losing that customer for good.

An example

Like last week, let’s start with an example. It’s a busy Wednesday afternoon, and this message comes in from a customer. This is the fifteenth message in a fairly long-running ticket, and the engineer assigned to it is not currently on duty.

Hi XXXX,

Thanks for spending so much time on this issue with me. After conferring with my leadership, we’ve agreed that a partial workaround we’ve developed internally to get around this is sufficient for us for now, so you can close this one out.

YYYY

So does this message make your ears prick up? It certainly would for me. Let’s look at the suspicious things here:

• The issue is not resolved (and hasn’t been for a while)

• The customer has raised this to their leadership team

• They’ve decided that a partial workaround is sufficient to them for now

• This is the first that you’ve heard of this workaround

• They aren’t sharing the details of the workaround

Any one of these would be somewhat concerning to me, but all four of them together set off alarm bells. This is an unhappy customer, even if they’re not coming out and saying it. So what should the assigned support engineer do about this?

I’ll get into what ‘should’ be done under the Making sure it’s done right header below, but I’ll start by saying: there is some good news here. No messages of this type are anywhere near as urgent as security-related tickets. So don’t sweat it too much if your engineer doesn’t even read this message till they’re back on duty. It’s fine. However, it remains just as important to get your responses right to these messages as it is for security-related issues.

Consequences of mishandling

Disgruntled customers are bad news for two main reasons, both fairly obvious:

• You might lose the customer: obviously. If a customer is having serious problems with you, whether or not they’re openly sharing those concerns with you, then you risk losing them if you can’t or won’t solve their problems. This might not happen immediately: a customer might not have any alternatives—yet—or may simply decide to wait until it’s time to renew their licenses. But if they’re still dissatisfied by the time competitors come knocking, or by renewal time, then you can expect to lose them.

• You might lose other customers, or fail to gain new ones: customers talk to each other. If your company gains a reputation of being unhelpful, or not responsive to customer needs, that reputation can be hard to shake. Other customers will certainly get wind of the situation, and may have second thoughts at renewal time. Other businesses in your target market will also hear these stories if they start evaluating you as a vendor, and that kind of a reputation can be enough to sway a customer away from you.

• Bonus: There’s a third consequence, though it’s arguable that it’s just an offshoot of the second one. Startups are always keeping their eyes on funding, and even larger companies are always interested in accumulating capital for future expansion. The kind of a reputation that drives customers away is going to do the same for venture capital, private equity funds, and any other deep-pocketed organizations or individuals you might be courting for an influx of cash. Money has ears too.

Making sure it’s done right

Angry customers are both easier and more difficult to deal with than security issues. Why are they more difficult? Because there are as many reasons for customers to be upset as there are customers. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. One customer may be mollified by a conversation with your CEO. Another one might not be satisfied until they see faster response times, or features built to their spec. Yet another one might be a lost cause entirely, and nothing you can do will make them happy. Each customer, and each issue, has to be dealt with on its own terms and missteps are likely unless you know them both very well.

So why are these issues also easier to address than security issues? Because you probably already have a team dedicated to keeping customers happy: customer success. The customer success manager (CSM) is uniquely positioned to dig into the core reasons behind customer dissatisfaction and develop a plan to resolve those issues. So the ‘doing it right’ advice here is simple: hand it off to the customer’s CSM, and let them do their thing.

Of course, it’s not as easy as throwing the case over the transom and washing your hands of it. Your handoff process for customer dissatisfaction issues should be sure to cover all of the necessary ground so the CSM isn’t going in blind. The details will vary for each case thus handed over, but at a minimum the support engineer needs to convey:

• Background of issue: what was the original cause of this support issue? Is it technical or nontechnical? Was the customer annoyed by it from the beginning, or is this a recent development? Without getting too deep into the technical weeds, the support engineer needs to bring the CSM up to speed on everything they need to know about the support issue in question. It’s the CSM who will be the primary point of contact for the disgruntled customer, so they need to have all of the relevant information at their fingertips.

• Reason it’s still an issue: why hasn’t this been resolved yet? Is it because it’s a bug that engineering hasn’t prioritized? Is it a feature request that Product has determined is not going on the roadmap, or maybe just won’t be developed as quickly as the customer wants? The CSM needs to understand these things before they can start to put together a plan to address them.

Beyond these, customer dissatisfaction-related issue handoffs are somewhat unique because the handoff often isn’t complete. If the customer is mad about a technical issue that isn’t yet resolved, the support engineer still has a role to play. They will need to continue to answer technical questions, interact with Product and Engineering, and generally serve as a technical tag-team partner to the CSM. The two of them must work together to bring the customer back to a satisfied state. Regular touchpoint meetings between the two are essential to make sure there are no bottlenecks, either technical or business-related. As a united front, they’ll also be more effective advocating for specific technical measures (e.g. prioritized bugfixing or an expedited feature request) than they might be on their own.

Sidebar: what if there’s no CSM?

If your organization doesn’t have customer success, and support engineers are on their own to handle customer relationships, then you’ll have to implement a streamlined version of the above within the support organization. Using support engineers as customer success could be (and probably will be) a post of its own, but in brief:

• Teach your team to recognize frustration: while this is important for all customer engineering teams, it is critical for dual-role support engineers to recognize, and attempt to mitigate, customer frustration.

• Prioritize empathy in customer interactions: dual-role support engineers can’t approach tech support in a transactional manner, but must be prepared to build relationships and empathy with the customers they’re interacting with regularly.

• Include customer satisfaction in team KPIs (key performance indicators): if support engineers are responsible for customer happiness, this should be reflected, and success should be rewarded, in team performance metrics.

The stakes are high for addressing issues of deep customer dissatisfaction, particularly if there are technical reasons for this frustration. If the CSM and support engineer are not able to resolve those technical and business-related issues to the customer’s satisfaction, the company may lose a customer. But if they are successful, you may end up with a customer who’s not just satisfied, but a new fan.

Thanks for reading Andy's Support Notes 💻💥📝!