Yesterday was my Customer Day

Customer Day is the day that I spend once per quarter answering support questions and problems. First problem I had. There isn’t enough problems to keep me busy. I really struggled to find and grab cards that I could solve. Second problem was that the questions that were coming through were for the most part about store transactions and nothing to do with our products and all about how they bought and paid for them. And the worst part was to resolve these questions it typically involved multiple confusing steps and they sometimes crossed multiple people involved in the chain. The third big gotcha for the day was our lack of process for support. We are not repeatable and as such we can’t improve. We have to focus on process. Definitely not what I was expecting in terms of lessons learned, but mission accomplished for customer day! I absolutely learned something I didn’t know before.

Now the rules of customer day are that you can have up to three observations from the day. I only have TWO “groups” of observations. Yes, a bit of a cheat...

First Observation: WE NEED MORE PROCESSES. In particular;

• The introduction to Customer Day for the person signing up for it has to be way tighter, scheduled, and with explicit instructions. It is far too loose and vague. I’m the founder and if I can’t follow it how is the brand new person going to get it?
• At the start of the day we need one defined process that everyone does to confirm that nothing was missed in Intercom, Community and Zendesk from the day before. A simple start of the day method and check list that is proven, and everyone follows, and by everyone doing it there is no possible way that anything goes longer than 24 hours past the time it should have been followed up on. Right now everyone has an ad hoc process.
• If someone requests priority support services; call, remote, etc. we have a standard process for confirming that they are subscribed, or not, including how to verify if their conversation isn’t authenticated and as such not flagged as priority support. Right now it appears to be ad hoc in application, and how done.
• We need more defined clarification about what we will and won’t support. We are spending time trying to help users with very old hardware, who don’t have priority support, and it is very unlikely that we will succeed to make it work, and in either case there is no business model to support this effort. We shouldn’t be doing this.
• We have a process whereby once per month one person reviews all online help, top to bottom, word for word, and we make any corrections or changes. Our documentation should never be out of date due to mistakes by more than one month ever. I found a fairly obvious error.
• We have a process each month that reconciles all questions received from Users about that’s month’s recurring invoices and we determine how we can proactively, not reactively, answer them for next month. The number of questions received should be continually declining.
• We need a process, an automated way for booking training. There is a lot of back and forth for scheduling and it looks like some things get missed in the shuffle. We need an online calendar of some form that a User can directly book their own training times in. We get notified. If they aren’t confirmed as paid we let them know and put the session on hold till cleared.

Second Observation: The overwhelming majority of traffic and noise is due to Store transactions, questions and friction. Almost all of it can be eliminated by doing the following:

• Invoice links require no authentication. Accounting departments can’t get to our invoices to pay them.
• Invoices have a link on them to get our W8. They should never have to contact us. The W8 should be available on the account page and checkout cart as well.
• Invoices have links to “more info” on the products on the invoice. The user can find out what they purchased. They don’t have to ask.
• From the cart that User should be able to apply for on account credit and if they complete the online form we immediately give them a low dollar limit. The form is then queued for review and their credit can either be increased or closed if we don’t feel they are credit worthy for further purchases. Or, if what they purchase exceeds the low credit limit we let it go through but hold shipment till approved, or reject.
• Using the same method, Users can upload their tax exempt form, and their transaction is immediately exempt. We review all forms submitted once per day and if a form is rejected we reject the tax exemption for that account for any further transactions. If the purchase exceeds a certain threshold we hold it till approved but we don’t block it from completing.
• From the account page the User can request a refund of a particular invoice, they enter the reason, and hit submit. It is queued for review by a designated person once per day and if approved the person hits refund, full or partial, and it is automatically refunded, User notified, and noted on their account page. No going to Stripe. No Intercom conversations.
• The above means that one person, in non-interrupt mode, reviews on account applications, then tax exempt forms, and then refunds, once per day, probably for at the very most 30 minutes, and all of those interruptions for all of the above are eliminated from the day.
• If a credit card fails we show everything we know, everything, there is absolutely no reason to go check Stripe. And we further include a note that we are Canadian and they should confirm if they can buy from Canada.
• We include a note on the cart check out and on our invoices for those clients paying by credit card that we are Canadian, and some US credit card companies will charge an International Fee, and that we can’t do anything about it.
• Recipients of invoice notifications and invoices can opt out of receiving further notices. We don’t manually do it for them.
• The customer is able to manage and change which credit card they have on file with no assistance from us.
• The customer is able to use fixed billing, by display, not metered, and pay for one year’s worth at a time. They don’t want to deal with monthly bills. All products in the Store must have a monthly and yearly option.
• When looking up invoices in the store, checking out carts, and other activities, it can take up to 8 seconds for pages to load. Needs to be faster.

All in all an awesome Customer Day. And here is the really powerful thing. All of my coworkers do the same thing once per quarter, and all of us are looking to find problems, the friction, the improvements, the ah ha moments, about what our customers want and what they are experiencing. This isn’t a one-time thing, by one person, this never goes away, this continuous investigation and improvement is just that, CONTINUOUS.

Service Business Product Owners

Creating a product, whether digital or a physical good, is all about designing the “thing” to deliver the maximum delight to the consumer of it. No more than required as the law of diminishing returns will kick in and the cost and complexity of the product will start to drive your customers away for every “might want feature” that you tack on. You as Product Owner have to find that sweet spot and science the crap out of it to maximize your ROI and focus your solution for as much market penetration as possible along the vertical that you have chosen.

Creating a product that is a service that you deliver is exactly the same thing, but, you are not building a product, instead you are building a process to deliver the maximum delight to the consumer of the service. You are a process engineer. Continuously tweaking how your customer buys, you deliver, and they take delivery, of the service you offer. You don’t want to add more to your service than you need as you will “over” serve and annoy your consumer and drive their costs up. Instead, you want to deliver what appears to be the maximum service ever received for the least possible effort on your part. You science the crap out of this as well, but this time “process engineer” it. Constantly innovate how and what you deliver and measure the results of every change you make. Process Engineer (Build), Measure, Learn and repeat for the service industry. Every person on your team has to instinctively know the process, without hesitation, and they have to be constantly creating and embracing change in the process to continually one up the delivery of your product. If your team isn’t in synch, in full flow as a team, your service will suffer and your customers will in turn suffer.

We Don’t Sell Time, We Sell Scrum Points

Rather than selling time on custom creative and software projects we have now moved to selling points. Scrum points. Before we would estimate a project based upon hours and then have to tediously track time against the project to make sure we weren’t going over while in parallel breaking the work down into cards with points and setting the project up on our Scrum board. Two parallel processes whose value cancels each other out due to the loss from duplication of work. To resolve this we decided to move to a pure Scrum points quoting system. Every task needed to complete a project is quoted based upon how many Scrum points we think it will take. We know on average from our weekly Scrum velocity tracking how many points we typically ship in a day, what it costs to run the company on average per month and we how many full time equivalent employees we have for that month.  Dividing the operating costs by the full time equivalent employees and then again by roughly 20 business days for the month gives us our cost per day. Taking the average cost per day and dividing it by the average number of points shipped in a day gives us our cost per point. We then take the total project points estimate and multiply it by the cost per point and again by the markup or profit we want to attain and that gives us our project estimate. We manage how well we are doing against our estimates by tracking Scrum velocity on a weekly basis at the macro level, not at the project detail level. If it is going up, we are working faster than we thought, staying the same, okay, but not improving, declining, something isn’t right and we need to fix it.

Predictable Revenue

Reading and thinking about predictable revenue http://predictablerevenue.com/ You can’t have it unless you are process / system driven. A focus on closing just passes the problem of a bad fit down the line. A closed sale that is a bad fit or has a bad hand off creates un-happy customers and kills referrals. Focus on lead generation, the qualification of the lead, which means the fit, don’t rush it, if there is one, great, close it, if not, gracefully bow out.

How Not To Get Hired

Send me, or possibilities@risevision.com, your resume as an attachment, nothing else, and even worse, the attachment is a Word Doc. These immediately go to the trash.

If you took the time to include a cover email, or attached letter (least preferred), I’ll read it. If the cover letter says “I am really excited about the opportunity and what a great company that you have that is going great places” and then proceeds to tell me all about them and how awesome they are. To the trash it goes.

If the person says “I would like a call within the next few days to discuss the opportunity” or other such demand with specifics as to when and where this call will happen, to the trash it goes. I might be too Canadian but this just seems pushy and rude to me.

However, if the candidate tells me their understanding of what the position is all about, and describes what they have learned about our company, and how this role within the company could solve a major problem for us, or create amazing opportunities, and then they paint a picture of how their skills and experience could make that pain go away, or that opportunity materialize to move the needle (whatever metric they choose) for the company. Now I am really excited. They don’t have to be right, they just have to demonstrate that they did the research and that they have thoughts as to why this would be a really good fit for both of us. Now if they can’t describe this succinctly, in a 95% grammatically correct way, with no spelling mistakes, and no text message cryptic acronyms and all lowercase sentences, to the trash it goes. I’m disappointed because there was potential but being able to communicate is critical to us.

Now if that cover letter refers to an attached resume I’ll put aside my biases and open it and if there is a fit, we will talk.

But, if that cover email (notice I didn’t say letter) refers to an online resume, a personal website, now I am pumped! And if that website also includes a blog that journals their thoughts and lessons learned over the course of their academic and working lives, I am completely over the moon. I will be sending emails to see when they are available and waiting in anticipation to see what we can learn from them.