Customer Experience: Perception is a reality

Our product is hosted so the Internet is a mission critical piece of infrastructure which lately has been giving us some headaches with key customers. the Customer Experience is very susceptible to perception of bad things happening all the time. In this case we had some interruption of service with in a 30 day window that has turned into the "always down" syndrome that customers think is the case. the reality is the outages occurred during a time when a large number of customers needed access to their data. The experience they had quickly turned from i like this product to this product "never" delivers. the truth about uptime is this: its not 24/7/365 that matters but "when i need access it better be there" and that is a much harder service level to maintain. The Customer Experience is created and strengthened or weakened and destroyed everyday.

Customer Experience: Noise

Our Customer Experience team is creating projects for 2009. One of the things we are dealing with is "Noise". This "noise" is any type if task put to our team from either internal or external sources that does move one of our projects forward. Everyone deals with "noise" in there day to day workings. Each morning you get to work and think "today i will get these 5 tasks done" and by the end of a long 10 plus hour day you have 2.5 tasks incomplete. The reason for that is the "noise". Our group is just starting to move to the Agile methodology that is used primarily for software development. The cool thing is this methodology can apply to other types of tasks such as those our team needs to perform. Agile lets us prioritize and maintain focus on our projects without listening to the "noise" and getting distracted. we kickoff the new Agile way with our first Scrum meeting in January.