The Customer Gap

Presented at Code Climate Summit with Abby Armada on 20170719

Transcript

1. The Customer Gap Abby Armada & Gordon Diggs Code Climate Summit 20170719
3. Likes running and eating tacos. Abby Armada Customer Support Lead @mygiantrobot
4. Gordon Diggs Director of Engineering Collects records and cooks lasagna. @gordondiggs
5. Many companies list customer focus as a core value, but few engineers spend time talking to their customers.
6. The customer gap: The delta between a stated customer focus and the reality of how engineering spends its time.
8. • Building empathy within engineering • Processes to improve collaboration • Closing gaps to other departments
9. Engineers with Customer Empathy
10. We have it kind of easy.
12. Build empathy into your engineering culture
13. Building Empathy: • Talk to customers regularly • Read their tweets • Answer their issues • Update them about incidents • Watch them use the product
14. Building empathy is harder with bigger teams
15. Helping Each other
16. Escalations
17. Escalation Sources:
18. Before: • Weekly rotation of an engineer to work on escalations • Didn’t have a consistent way to track the work • Confusion and sadness
19. Quarterly Support Engineers
20. Triaging Issues Severity 1 to 4
22. SEVERITY 1
23. Proactive Education
24. Resolution time per month New process
25. Escalations per month New process
26. Product / Support Sync
30. Meeting Agenda • Work in progress • Upcoming releases • Customer communication needs • Feature requests
31. How it Helps
32. Feature Requests
33. Before: • Bad GitHub repo • Bad Trello board • No review process
37. 25% of feature requests were actioned by product
38. You have to work together to solve these problems
39. Closing the Gap to Other Departments
40. Marketing
41. Sales
42. Sales + Engineering • Building features for potential customers • Technical lead review • Installation • Customer rapport
43. Customer Support
44. Customer Success
45. Well-Rounded Engineers
46. The Engineer Remembers
47. More experience with customers leads to better features
48. Support is nagging you for a reason
50. Summing It Up
51. Build empathy within your engineering team
52. Build empathy within your engineering team — and start small
53. Customer Support and Engineering collaboration is key
54. Include engineers in every stage of your customers’ life cycle
55. Happy Customers == Happy Business
56. Thank you! @mygiantrobot @gordondiggs Thanks to: Ashley Baldwin-Hunter, Devon Blandin, Pat Brisbin, Kathryn Chen, Noah Davis, Alyssa Diggs, Kären Engelbrecht, Emily Fueger, Chris Hulton, Will Fleming, Dave Henton, Mattan Ingram, Max Jacobson, Ale Paredes, Noah Portes Chaikin, Reid Smith