Increasing Customer Satisfaction

There’s been a big push to increase customer satisfaction, and the Head Of Development is actively monitoring the biggest issues seen by our users.

Colin has been looking at the most frequent errors and trying to proactively fix them. One “frequently occurring” error is from a group of users that need to log into multiple organisations. 

For this to work, you have to have both client versions installed and use a launcher to log into the correct version. However, instead of using this tool, they are just using the same client but logging into an organisation assigned to the other version. The version difference between client and server causes crashes when using certain features.

Our software wasn’t initially designed for this since 95% of users just log in under 1 “organisation”, so support for this requirement has been retroactively added (the launcher), but it isn’t perfect at the moment. 

There’s a team working on better support. Until then, we should instruct users how to use our software correctly, then release an update to stop this from happening.

So the “frequently occurring” error is that these users are not using the launcher, then encountering crashes when they try to use certain features. However Colin aims to “fix it” by adding some defensive code. All that will happen is one particular server call will now “succeed”, but there will be loads of other server calls that will have the problem.

If the user now sees a particular feature is now supported, but another feature isn’t, then surely they may ring Support and ask why it isn’t supported. Support will tell them they aren’t using the software correctly, but the user will say that we should support it because we have addressed similar issues before.

I discussed my concerns with Colin and he eventually agreed to cancel his changes. 

Really, the endgame for Colin isn’t to please customers, it is to please the Head of Development who is aware of these errors. If he sees that the errors aren’t happening anymore, then he will be pleased. We need to make sure we are actually addressing the root causes of the issues, rather than hiding the problems.