Reframing Customer Satisfaction
Grasping how software defects truly affect our customers isn't straightforward. It's more than just counting bugs; it's about understanding the real-world frustration and inconvenience those defects cause over time. I wanted a way to capture this ongoing customer pain in a simple metric.
So, I landed on something I'm calling the Customer Experience Pain Score (CEPS). The idea is to not just count the defects but to factor in how long they persist in production, impacting customers day after day.
CEPS = Number of Defects × Average Duration in Production
In the example above, a CEPS score of 500 might not mean much on its own, and that's okay. It's meant to serve as a signal—a prompt for us to dig deeper. As product and engineering leaders, adding CEPS to our toolkit gives us another lens through which to assess our impact on customers.
Usually, when defect counts rise, we scramble: reallocating resources, addressing technical debt, or firefighting to prevent negative reviews and incidents. But CEPS highlights another path. By keeping an eye on how long defects linger, we gain insights into how our engineering efforts directly affect customer satisfaction over time.
A Closer Look at CEPS
Let's break it down with an example.
Baseline CEPS Calculation:
Improvement Strategy 1: Reducing Defects by Half
Improvement Strategy 2: Halving the Average Duration in Production
What stands out here is that enhancing operational efficiency—by optimizing defect management, streamlining triage and resolution processes, and improving our deployment and testing pipelines—can significantly boost customer satisfaction. In fact, reducing the time defects linger in production can have an impact equal to fixing the defects themselves.
In practice, we aim to tackle both fronts simultaneously. By adopting this holistic approach, we not only alleviate immediate customer pain but also build long-term trust and loyalty. Plus, we create a more efficient engineering operation along the way.
CEPS isn't about assigning blame or adding more metrics for the sake of it. It's about putting ourselves in our customers' shoes and striving to minimize the pain they experience. After all, every unresolved defect is a missed opportunity to show our commitment to quality and customer satisfaction.