Kool Aid Served Daily

I was walking across the Santa Clara campus Thursday morning and it was still wet - either from rain, dew, or watering. As I walked down one pavement, I noticed a snail in front of me. I immediately thought I should help it get off to the grass. After all, it could easily be stepped on. But sometimes a snail is fragile, and definitly yucky, so I passed on. I then counted about 10 snails, all trying to get to the grass. I realized that snails are just like customers. And I decided to take some pictures to prove my point.

First of all, I went back to get that first snail, if I had helped him, I would have been trapped helping them all. That happened to me at NetApp when I started helping NGS on the customer mailing lists. They came to expect my help and if I didn't respond fast enough, they sought me out. They would bypass policy and procedure to call me up at home, at the pool, after I left NetApp, etc.

That picture didn't come out very well. Perhaps I was blocking the pain.

I also wanted to take a picture of two snails close together. One had to be larger than the other. The point was if two customers come to you at the same time, which do you help? At NetApp, the answer might be both. I got 4 escalations in a 12 hour period one weekend. But do you help the bigger one? Perhaps the smaller one is a reference account and no one told you how important they are to the company. You can't trust the sales guys to tell you how important the customer is to your bottom line. After 2 months of doing escalations, I had to yawn when I was told an account was worth $2 million. Yawn, I was supposed to drop a $20 million account to help a $2 million one?

Anyway, I almost threw out that picture as well. But it proves a point:

Sometimes you can't help a customer because you can't figure out what is going on. It could be that they've supplied you with bad information, your customer support organization has held onto the case for too long, or there is too much going on.

Another way to look at this is in this image, where at just the right magnification, the problem looks clear:

But as you get closer, as you peel the onion (a term I hate thanks to 4 months of startup hell), you find that things aren't really that clear:

Sometimes you might find a customer like this snail. They've been working with you so long to find a problem that they are going in circles: (If you look at the snail trail, you can see it has been circling the wagons.)

Sometimes you really need to avoid being pulled into this mess. No matter what you do, the customer will have no faith that you have helped them solve their problem. Also, you might fix the current problem and expose the next problem for some other department to fix. And then the customer comes back to you. The upside is if you really do fix their problem, your customer support and sales teams will remember that and come straight to you with the next tough one.

I want to close with a fascinating one:

This one is crystal clear and the customer is safe at home. If you help out, you might make the problem worse. (By the way, in reality, this snail was moving fast. I tried to get a movie, but my batteries were too low.)

My final thought was I should step on one and show you what happens when a customer gets really bad support. But I don't do that to snails, even to prove a good point. Perhaps that also says I wouldn't do that to a customer.

By the way, I understand NetApp now has a Level 3 customer support organization in place and is making head roads into reducing the strain on development engineers.