Reframing Customer Satisfaction

We all would like to grasping the full impact of software defects on the customer experience. It is difficult and nuanced. While severity scores have traditionally been used to gauge the impact of these defects, they fall short of telling the whole story. It's not solely about the functional impact; prolonged exposure to poor quality can reflect a company's commitment to its customers. The Customer Experience Pain Score (CEPS) is a metric designed to quantify the level of inconvenience and frustration endured by customers due to software issues, incorporating the duration of pain as a critical component.

The formula for calculating CEPS is straightforward yet effective in highlighting customer pain caused by persistent and overlooked quality issues: (Number of Defects) × (Average Duration in Production)

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In this scenario, a CEPS score of 500 might seem arbitrary without context. That's fine. It's just a signal. Product and Engineering leaders should add it to their bucket of signals and assess. Conventionally, the response to high defect counts usually includes allocating resources to address defects, mitigate technical debt, or both—often triggered by negative reviews, press, or significant incidents. However, the CEPS formula shows that there are other paths for improvement. By consistently monitoring CEPS as an internal KPI, we gain insights into how our engineering efforts and investments directly affect customer satisfaction.

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A Closer Look at CEPS

Consider the initial CEPS calculation:

Improvement Strategy 1: Reducing Defects by Half

Improvement Strategy 2: Halving the Average Duration in Production

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This underscores that enhancing operational efficiency—through optimized defect management, triage, resolution processes, and improved deployment and testing pipelines—can significantly boost customer satisfaction, equaling the impact of rectifying production defects.

Of course, in the real world, we can do both at the same time. But hopefully this holistic approach not only mitigates immediate customer pain but also fosters long-term trust and loyalty, along with efficient engineering operations.