Four guiding principles in dealing with software problems to achieve great client experience

You build a great software product. You offer it as a service. Your business grows. Clients demand new features. Load is increasing on your service. Clients start to rely more and more on your service and expect a good quality of service.

You realize that to grow and be successful, your clients need to be happy. How to keep them happy? By providing the best client experience possible. But how to optimize for client experience?

Well, what negatively impacts client experience the most? When your service is slow. When your service is down. When your service is not functioning correctly. But we all know that problems are a fact of life. Software will be slow from time to time. It will crash. Bugs will creep in. Problems with your service are guaranteed to occur sooner or later. And each such problem decreases client satisfaction.

There are a couple of guiding principles around dealing with problems I find useful for achieving the best client experience:

There are multiple techniques and mechanisms to help us follow these principles. Going forward I name a few as examples, to give a better view over when the above principles can help us and how.

Of course, the first instinct is to try and reduce as possible the rate at which problems with your service will appear. By reducing the sheer number of problems, we make the first step towards improving our client experience. Here we can focus on pre-emptive approaches.

We all know that problems will always occur. Regardless of how much we try to avoid them. So, the next 3 principles focus on “making the best of a bad situation”. Helping us mitigate the negative consequences of problems.

The first thing to do when problems occur is to detect that a problem has occurred. There is generally a big decrease in client satisfaction if the client detects the problems and reports them before you do. So what can we do?

Through a combination of monitoring client experience metrics, and constant end-to-end testing, we can detect most of the problems before our customers. Detecting problems early allows us to fix them faster. Which in turn increases client satisfaction with our product.

Problems will always occur, regardless of how much we try to avoid them. So, our next step is to try and reduce the impact (blast radius) of problems when they occur, limiting their impact to as few clients as possible.

Another objective important in ensuring client happiness is trying to fix any problem that occurs as fast as possible. Here we can split the discussion in two. Recovering from a bad deployment, when the new code does not function as expected. And recovering from an issue that surfaces during runtime, without doing any changes inside the system or code.

To get the best client experience we have to consider what negatively impacts that in each step of what we do. When we design a new feature. When we implement it. When we release it in production. When we operate and maintain our service. In everything we do, we can keep in mind a few guiding principles: minimize problem occurrence rate, minimize problem detection time, minimize problem impact, minimize problem recovery time.

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